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22 Days of Eating Like Beyoncé, Day 8: Will It Really Tip the Scales? - The Root
How Katy Perry could have won the ‘Dark Horse’ lawsuit - The Washington Post
How Artist Imposters and Fake Songs Sneak Onto Streaming Services - Pitchfork

22 Days of Eating Like Beyoncé, Day 8: Will It Really Tip the Scales? - The Root

Posted: 21 Aug 2019 03:01 PM PDT

For everyone who thinks 22 days of veganism will get you bodied like Beyoncé (or think that I think it will), think again—or so says my scale, which this morning registered approximately a pound of weight loss after a week of loosely following the 22 Days Nutrition plan. While those results are far from impressive (or particularly incentivizing), they're not upsetting, either; especially when considering that "loosely" part. I hate to disappoint you, but no one's getting Bey-like results unless you a) train the way Beyoncé does, and b) follow the plan to the letter—including strict portion sizes. Plus, by Marco Borges' own account (you know, Bey's trainer and creator of the 22 Days Nutrition program), it actually took the Queen 44 days—not 22—to get Coachella-ready.

So, why is 22 days the magic number?

"The name (22 Days) was inspired by the idea that it takes 21 days to make or break a habit. I use that principle to help others adopt a healthy habit, and on the 22nd day, they've found the way!" writes Borges on the plan's site.

But if I'm not going to lose weight any faster than I could following pretty much any other regulated plan, why bother? And on that note, if I'm not going to follow the plan to the letter, what's the point of doing it at all?

I can only speak for myself, but after years of counting calories, points, and hours of the day I can eat and not eat, I was curious—and tired. Two of the biggest selling points of Borges' program is that it's better for the environment and promises increased energy; something that has been in very short supply the past two years of my life. And since we know that lasting change is a marathon and not a sprint, I have to approach it in a way that makes sense for my over-scheduled life; meaning going as plant-based as possible, but with veganism as the overall priority, which means a few ready-made options have to be on hand (and we'll get into the distinction between vegan and plant-based soon).

"One of our goals at 22 Days Nutrition is to get you out of the mindset of calorie counting and into the mindset of 'what is healthy for me?'" Borges' site boasts. "If your focus is on eating clean plant-based meals, you will notice that you feel satisfied and nourished after your meals, and your health will likely follow. Our goal is to provide meal recommendations that leave you feeling alive!"

Alive enough to regularly get my ass back in the gym is the hope because that's what I'll likely need to get back to my fighting weight, though as Borges writes in a blog post about eating vs. exercise:

Sure, we should eat healthier, and exercise—and in an ideal world that is what we would do. But our days are busy and filled with work and home obligations, not to mention wanting to spend time enjoying the nicer things in life. So, if you are intent on getting healthy, you may have to choose whether you want to focus on food or fitness. According to research, start with food first. An analysis of more than 700 weight loss studies found that people have the best results by eating healthier rather than with exercise alone.

The key to embracing weight loss through diet, or exercise, or both, is to start small and try to be consistent. Overhauling your entire lifestyle, while feeling cathartic in the short run, is simply not maintainable in the long run for most people.

So while after a week on the program I may not be much thinner, by that metric, I have to admit I'm doing pretty well and feeling pretty...great. Buoyant, even. And while those of you who've been following along might credit that buoyancy to an upswing in my personal life, I have to admit there's something calming and deeply satisfying about this whole guilt-free eating thing. I feel—dare I say it—wholesome. (And I even got some exercise in this first week, so...progress?)

In short, since my goal is not a quick fix, I'm going to try not to lean into my usual neuroses by obsessing over the scale, and instead try to focus on how I'm feeling over these remaining two weeks—easier said than done for a Type A like myself. Whether or not I stay strictly vegan, if this experience gives me the jumpstart I need to keep going, it'll be worth giving up my beloved charcuterie plates—so wish me luck?

How Katy Perry could have won the ‘Dark Horse’ lawsuit - The Washington Post

Posted: 02 Aug 2019 12:00 AM PDT

Katy Perry at the 10th annual DVF Awards in New York on April 11. (Andy Kropa/Invision/AP)

By Edward Lee

August 2

Edward Lee is a professor at the IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Jurors in Los Angeles on Thursday found that singer Katy Perry, her co-songwriters and the music label behind her 2013 hit song "Dark Horse" must pay $2.78 million for copyright infringement. The jury on Monday had reached a unanimous verdict that Perry's "Dark Horse" copied the catchy electronic beat of the 2009 Christian song "Joyful Noise" by Flame (whose real name is Marcus Gray). Jurors rejected the defendants' positions that they had never heard, much less copied, "Joyful Noise" and that the beat was too basic to have been copyrightable. Perry will be docked more than $550,000, with the bulk of the damages assessed to Capitol Records.

Perry is not the only megastar to face a copyright imbroglio. Pharrell and Robin Thicke lost a high-profile case to Marvin Gaye's estate after a jury found that their song "Blurred Lines," the top selling song of 2013, infringed the copyright of Gaye's 1977 hit "Got To Give It Up." Led Zeppelin now faces a rehearing in the appeal of the jury verdict finding that the guitar opening of the band's iconic 1971 song "Stairway to Heaven" did not infringe the copyright of Spirit's "Taurus" from 1968. The rapper Drake, too, is involved in an appeal of a lower-court decision that found in his favor, defending against a copyright infringement claim.

The list goes on — major performers including Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran and Jay-Z have all faced legal action for allegedly copying other artists' works. Although most of these artists prevailed in or settled the lawsuits, Mars, Sheeran and Jay-Z face still more.

The storm of lawsuits is troubling. Is there an epidemic of musical plagiarism by major recording artists? Unethical copying might explain some cases, but other factors are likely to be at play. First is simply the nature of music, which has a limited number of notes, chords and beats that sound harmonious together. An even smaller number of these elements are effective for popular songs and are employed by savvy artists and producers attempting to appeal to young people's changing tastes. The acoustic tools that Dmitri Shostakovich used can't be adapted for hip-hop.

Moreover, research in recent years suggests that humans innately recognize universal patterns in music, such as certain combinations of beats. Humans are, in effect, hard-wired for music. No wonder many songs sound similar, given the narrow range of appealing notes and patterns.

Add copyright law to the mix, and music lawsuits become inevitable. Copyright law has evolved in several ways that increase, unintentionally, the exposure of musicians and songwriters to copyright infringement claims. The first development is modern courts' apparent shift away from early courts' acceptance of the need for borrowing to compose music — an approach that Judge Benjamin Kaplan favorably described in 1967 in his seminal book on copyright as the law's "permissive attitude toward cross-lifting among serious musical works."

Although an entire field of study of "musical borrowing" documents the commonplace overlap of musical works from classical to contemporary, copyright law today increasingly subjects any apparent borrowing of musical elements to greater suspicion. The lengthy term of copyright, lasting the life of the author plus 70 years, and a 2014 Supreme Court decision on the statute of limitations for copyright claims, compounded the problem by allowing the owners of many old copyrighted works to still bring copyright claims today — as with the Taurus suit filed in 2015 against Led Zeppelin more than four decades after the infringement allegedly started.

In copyright law, the fair use doctrine is supposed to provide an important limitation on infringement claims, allowing some breathing space for creators to borrow parts of existing works in the process of creating new, transformative works.

Yet few music infringement cases have discussed fair use outside of the small class of parody songs, as in a 1994 case when the Supreme Court recognized the principle in 2 Live Crew's parody fair use of Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman." In the Drake case that is on appeal, he successfully employed fair use to defend his inclusion of a spoken-word passage from jazz musician Jimmy Smith, who died in 2005. (I was a signatory of an amicus brief supporting the fair use decision in Drake's case and of one supporting the verdict against Pharrell in Williams v. Gaye.) But the Drake case didn't involve copying of music. Courts have yet to determine, beyond parody songs, what constitutes fair use in borrowing elements of a musical work.

As I discuss in a 2018 article for the Boston College Law Review, the fair use defense might become more attractive for defendants as allegations of copyright infringement proliferate, especially if juries, as in the Katy Perry case, reject the "I never heard it" defense. Previously, defendants have been largely successful in taking that approach and in insisting that snippets of melodies or beats are not copyrightable. Courtroom losses and the assessment of significant financial damages might prompt musicians and producers to change their legal tune. What if Perry had invoked fair use to show how "Dark Horse" alters the beat of "Joyful Noise" by giving it new expression and a much different character in a song about romance, not religion?

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the title of the song of which Led Zeppelin was accused of infringing on the trademark, as well as the band that wrote it. The earlier song was "Taurus," by Spirit.

Alyssa Rosenberg: Before you cancel Michael Jackson, listen to his music one last time

Robert Gebelhoff: David Bowie was wrong about copyright — thankfully

David Post: Blurred lines and copyright infringement

Jonathan Capehart: How music propelled the civil rights movement: 'Voices of the Movement' Episode 7

How Artist Imposters and Fake Songs Sneak Onto Streaming Services - Pitchfork

Posted: 21 Aug 2019 08:32 AM PDT

To understand how leakers could game the system on paid platforms, it's important to understand the huge amount of control held by digital distribution companies. Artists are unable to directly upload their music onto streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music (versus YouTube or SoundCloud, which are often thought of as less "legitimate"), so they must go through some sort of distributor. Last year, Spotify experimented with allowing artists to upload their own music directly, but the function was recently nixed so that the service could focus on "developing tools in areas where Spotify can uniquely benefit [artists and labels]."

The biggest record labels often oversee their own distribution, but there are independent digital distributors of all sizes out there. Artists who are just starting out typically depend on distributors with a lower barrier of entry, like DistroKid or TuneCore. There are scores of these companies, their main appeal being that they charge little to nothing to upload a song to streaming services. Uploads are generally vetted to varying degrees of thoroughness by algorithms, human beings, or a combination of both, depending on the company.

In the case of the Beyoncé and SZA leaks, the leakers distributed the tracks to Spotify and Apple Music via Soundrop. Zach Domer, a brand manager for Soundrop, says he believes the leakers used the service because it does not require an upfront fee for distribution. "It's like, 'Oh cool, I don't have to pay DistroKid's $20 fee to do this fake thing,'" he said. "You can't prevent it. What you can do is make it such a pain in the ass, and so not worth doing, that [leakers] just go back to the dark web."

Domer told Pitchfork that Soundrop relies on a variety of systems to vet the legitimacy of their content, including "audio fingerprinting" systems similar to those powering the music identification app Shazam, as well as a small content approval team of three to four people. The team reviews any submissions that come back flagged, either because the songs triggered the fingerprinting system or have suspect metadata; an example of the latter would be the use of an existing artist name, which explains why these leaks typically don't use artist's official names. Though rudimentary, Soundrop's vetting process is more extensive than some of their competitors'. Domer says, for example, that the fake song briefly uploaded to Kanye West's Apple Music page last year should have been "super easy to catch."

The fake song/real profile phenomenon doesn't just happen to the Kanyes and Cartis of the industry. The manager of an unsigned act that has racked up over 50 million Spotify streams to date spoke with Pitchfork about their client's struggles with impersonators throughout 2018. Fallible authentication measures made it possible for unsanctioned music to appear on said artist's official Spotify profile. The manager issued takedown notices to the streaming service with mixed results: "The hurdle we came across was, will [Spotify] be able to remove the music, or will they shuffle it onto another profile and not actually remove it? There seems to be no consistency with which route is enforced."

In one instance described by the manager, an impersonator went so far as to create and distribute a fake album under the artist's name. According to the manager, it took three days for Spotify to remove it. "That was the first time we contacted a lawyer," the manager said. "We didn't end up needing to pursue legal action, but we came to the conclusion that it is incredibly hard to even sue anyone who you cannot legally identify. And even then, that person could have multiple accounts on multiple uploading platforms. If they get caught on one, they could just go to another."

While distributors are the ones who facilitate payments, all roads in the digital supply chain end with the streaming services. Companies like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Deezer are the final checkpoint before music reaches listeners. But with "close to 40,000" new tracks being uploaded to market leader Spotify every day, it seems near impossible, at least on the bigger services, to catch every single illegal upload before payouts accrue. There does not appear to be any publicly available information on how many of those tracks are vetted in the first place, or how many eventually get taken down due to copyright violations.

A source close to Spotify tells Pitchfork that it is standard practice for the company to flag pipelined releases from notable artists and double-check the accuracy of those uploads with the artists' representatives before they go live. This policy might explain how that fake Kanye track made it onto his Apple Music page but never surfaced on Spotify. It also might explain how "Free Uzi"—released and promoted by Lil Uzi Vert as his next single but characterized as a "leak" by his label, Atlantic—never made it onto Spotify, despite initially showing up on other streaming services. But it's unclear how many artists Spotify is willing to double-check for, and how that list is determined.

"When there's a million gallons of water and a two-foot pipe for all of that water to come through, people start to figure out another way through," said Errol Kolosine, an associate arts professor at New York University and the former general manager of prominent electronic label Astralwerks. "The fundamental reality is, if people are losing enough money or being damaged enough through this chicanery, you'll see something change. But the little people who don't have resources, well, it's just the same story as always."

When asked why labels haven't pressed the issue of streaming fraud, several of the industry figures interviewed for this piece mentioned "the metadata problem." This refers to the lack of a universal metadata database in music, which makes it incredibly difficult to keep track of personnel and rights holders on any given song, and thus a huge ongoing issue in the record business. Royalty tracking start-up Paperchain estimates that there is $2.5 billion in unpaid royalties owed to musicians and songwriters, due to shoddy metadata. (There doesn't seem to be an industry consensus on this figure; by contrast, Billboard puts the estimate at roughly $250 million.)

It's important to note that streaming scams will likely exist in some form with or without the existence of a metadata database. ("I don't know if there's ever going to be a pure technological solution to prevent somebody from uploading unreleased material under fake aliases, with fake metadata," said Domer.) But the fractured state of music metadata makes it far easier for bad actors to entangle themselves in the streaming ecosystem. It should not be possible for outside individuals to gain access to artists' official profiles on streaming services, and yet it occurs because there is no authentication protocol outside of individual companies' own vigilance. Having a system in place to ensure accurate metadata across companies appears to be a necessary first step.

Spotify's solution thus far seems to be the copyright infringement form on its website, which notes that artists "may wish to consult an attorney before submitting a claim." Apple Music has a similar online form. As for the distribution companies, DistroKid appears to be the only one to date that has developed a promising defense strategy, the aforementioned DistroLock. That said, even DistroKid stakeholder Spotify has yet to announce any plans to integrate DistroLock within its platform.

Ultimately, the problem at hand is greater than the risk of lost royalties. The prevalence of leaks on established streaming services has a significant impact on an artist's sense of ownership over their life's work. The lines become blurred as to whether something actually "exists" in an artist's canon if they never gave permission for it to be released. So while diehards might feel a thrill, circumventing the system and listening to unreleased songs by their favorite musicians, the leaks ultimately hurt those same artists. After the last of this June's many leaks, Playboi Carti uploaded a brief explanation to his Instagram Stories: "Hacked :(," it read. "I haven't released anything… I hate leaks." Beneath it, a GIF sticker: "Leave me alone."