Karaoke Forums

I'll have the video up when it's available, but today I took a major step in the fight against karaoke piracy in San Jose, I brought the issue to city council.

I can't really gauge what the reception was, but I could tell most of them were paying attention. I'm going to follow up with the councilmember that represents the district my club is in.

Thing is, our city already has an anti-piracy unit, but until now they've only focused on knock off gucci bags and such. Hopefully they'll see some dollar signs.

That is a good idea, but what do you hope to gain? I am asking respectfully (I really don't know). My area does not have that type of crime division, so is it something that they will take on, and what will they do? What do you hope they will do?

The San Jose police department has investigated bootleg and knockoffs at our local flea market, so it stands to reason they should be investigating karaoke piracy as well.

I'd like to see heavy regulation in San Jose when it comes to karaoke business's. I think there should be a fee paid per rig if you want to conduct karaoke business in San Jose. They could wrap it into a business license, the entertainment license we issue whatever.

I think before a license is issued, a DJ/KJ (or establishment) should have to provide proof of purchase from a legitimate source. $500 per rig, per year sounds reasonable to me to cover the cost of proof of purchase audits.

Interesting. An anti-piracy squad gives you a bit of leverage.

Just had our county assessor call for a better breakdown on what years we bought our discs and I asked her if there were many other karaoke companies on the rolls. She said they had just a few but they didn't have nearly the amount of equipment that we declared. I asked about discs and she said there were very few discs listed. So I explained that to legally run a karaoke business they have to have had their discs. She thought that was interesting and was going to direct her staff to look into it.

Don't know if anything will come of it but got a kick out of imagining the assessor calling people and asking for an accounting of their discs.

That's an interesting response lizard. I'm well known in political circles, and I have our county assessor on my face book friends lists. I've also met him a few times personally.

I think it's time we started pushing for government regulation of our industry. I'm normally against government interference, but if it's a choice between the government busting pirates, or the producers, I'd much rather have the government doing it (sorry SoundChoice/Chartbuster)

I am betting the manufacturers would have rather had the govt. keep it from getting to where it is now but they weren't getting any action.

So would we. It would save us a great deal of expense and lower the costs of production considerably.

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Toger,

Great job. Keep it going forward. I need to do the same thing here in our community.

Have you had any feedback from any of your council members yet?

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Not yet. I called the councilmembers office where my club is located. They told me they got my email, and he wasn't in his office. I asked for his voicemail, and they told me "He doesn't have one"

The City of San Jose paid $20m for a Cisco Unity VOIP phone system. I've admined a few of these, and I know for a FACT default settings is a blank VM inbox on every extension.

It's making me think, if I inspired you rumbolt, maybe we (the karaoke community at large) could start some sort of grass roots letter writing campaign. We could target one city council at a time (starting with mine, since I made this jump first)

After we get one city to do right and regulate this industry, we move onto the next (which we decide by a vote, most likely we'll do the most populace cities first)

I think we could do it.

I applaud the effort, but a government run annual "certification" is not likely to be the best route.

A $500 annual fee might sound reasonable for a full time KJ running several shows every week but it would just about wipe out all of the part timers.

A reasonable piracy investigation team can quickly learn to tell the likely pirates (80k+ songs), from the others. A very quick verification can check if someone who claims 80k songs has even a significant portion of them legally (and that could take minutes not hours).

THere is no reason for piracy police to be spending their time going after the KJs with 4k songs at the moment.

A full audit of my songbook (about 25k songs including dups) would take 100s of hours, and is just not worth it when I can show 1000+ physical CDs, and reciepts from other songs purchased through tricerisoft and Select A track.

It is difficult to imagine a town miising out on the opportunity to collect fees and taxes from yet another segment of people. It may be small potatoes to the feds but on a local level there could be people who care.

Dr Fred, then I'd hate to see your filing system. We have a total of over 26,000 titlea and unless the auditor was a tortoise, I'd doubt it would take much more than a couple of hours to do. Our library is on excel by manufacuter number and filed accordingly (SCs together CB together, etc and done numerically).

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You can be strange but not a stranger

Since everyone here who went through the audit said it took less than an hour, Fred just always loves to look at worst case scenerio.

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LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

I listed my discs by manufacturer's numbers and it took a total of 10 minutes combined to go through two audits (Sound Choice and Chartbuster). Of course they were only looking at their products. It was as simple as going through my hard drive and calling out ID'S.
KJAthena brought the most discs and it took only a couple of hours for her.

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The Line Array Experiment is over. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Same here, but that requires the auditor to TRUST you for the disk info and the info on the spreadsheet. If it is 1% wrong is that violations or incorrect book-keeping? How about all of the re-releases done by various manus???

I have SC8223 but not the version with Eddie Money "Take Me Home" for example. THat one song could be listed in my book and I could have the wrong version of the CD.

The Eddie Money version was recently sold on E-bay for $177.50. The non Eddie Money version sells for about $17 or less.

Yes a quick audit would see 1500 songs and 100 cds with 15 songs/cd. And the numbers matching but it would take many hours to catch things like the Eddie money song.

If there are a few songs that are not legit among many legit songs, the only way is to individually verify the cd label and track, or trust the files provided by the KJ. The whole idea of trusting lists and organization provided by the KJ defeats the concept of an audit.

For that matter why not list a few songs pirated with other manus or disk#s no way a 1 hour audit would catch them if they are only a few % of the total.

Then you show the disc you have and move on - change the song title in your book and thank them for pointing out you have this song instead of that song.
You don't actually give anyone your discs from what I understand, you show select discs asked for via webcam! I'm sure they take re-issues into consideration since some book makers don't necessarily have all the reissues in their database. So yes if you have that song listed, you may have to show the disc, since you don't actually have the song, you are in no violation in any manner, and you actually have a different song to list.

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LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

Dr. Fred.

Yesterday I tapped an email out to all councilmembers and the mayor regarding this. It's pretty long, but the short end of it is I came up with a better solution than a flat fee per rig.

Instead I proposed a $1.35 per rig, per night they run. For 365 days this comes out to about $500 if they only ran a single rig. It's probably still bad and needs work, but I'll take any input you got.

--------warning long long long----------

Honorable council members and Mayor,

This is going to be a little long, but please take the time to read.

I hope you don't mind this follow up to what I brought up in open
forum today about karaoke piracy in San Jose. It's happening in every
district in San Jose. I've also included Kurt Slep, CEO and Founder
of Sound Choice Karaoke, the largest karaoke disc producer in the US.
It's been a decade long fight for both of us.

It's not fair to the 80 year old young Japanese couple (The Umeharas)
that own bamboo have to compete with the 40+ venues that are fixed
installations using pirated content, or the ones that hire a mobile DJ
that pirates. They've run this business the last 30 years, paying all
their taxes and licenses to the city of San Jose, they deserve to be
able to run a business on a level playing field, free some other
people rendering services with pirated content. They've paid for
every song they own, I've made sure of that. It's also not fair to
Kurt, who produces what is arguable the largest, most popular (and
most pirated) karaoke brand int he US. They deserve your consideration
on this. I know copyright violations and piracy *might* be an issue
that can only be handled at the federal level, but there are other
ways to attack this through code enforcement and entertainment
licensing. Already several karaoke stores in San Jose have shut down,
because nobody was buying karaoke anymore (despite the number of
venues offering it has steadily risen since 2002 with the rise of
American Idol).

-This is what I propose.

If a venue or DJ runs karaoke, the non-refundable entertainment
license application fee should be $1.35@day for every system they run
in parallel. This comes out to about $500 @ year for every system
being run 7 days a week. If there's 2 systems being run 7 days a
week, that's $1000 @ year. The money collected from these fee's would
then be used for two purposes.

1. Some internet searching to make sure the applicant was truthful
about how many days a week they run karaoke, and the number of
parallel "rigs" they are running. General google search, and maybe
try to find out if they have myspace or facebook pages.
2. Perform a "proof of purchase audit"

If a DJ or venue fails 2, or there are some discrepancies from 1, deny
the license until they reach compliance.

-Compliance:

Compliance doesn't have to be hard. I've CC'd Kurt Slep on this for a
reason. He will tell you, he does not offer downloads of his karaoke.
He only sells discs. Any DJ with Sound Choice karaoke on their hard
drive, should also have an accompanying disc from Sound Choice.

So if a karaoke venue has any sound choice songs on their hard drive,
they should have a Sound Choice made CD in their possession. Simple
right?

Sound Choice isn't the only company that does not offer downloads.
Pretty much every American karaoke producer does not offer downloads
because of licensing restrictions from the original composers/artists
and US copyright law. That's it in a nutshell.

Kurt can go into all the details of Sync, Compulsorily and mechanical
copyright licensing if any of you want to hear more of it. I've heard
10 years of it, and understand it. During open forum I mentioned 7
Bamboo paid $8000 for 3600 karaoke songs, which comes out to about
$2.22 per song. I saw a few eyebrows raise when I mentioned that
price. The reason karaoke songs cost so much, is because of what I
mention above about the 3 licenses required to produce karaoke in the
US.

-Clues to piracy:

As pointed out, most of these guys have songbooks with 50,000 songs
and then some. Unless they had a rich relative that died, or they had
a great run in the stock market, there is no way the average person
would have paid $111,111 for a collection like that.

Multiple karaoke systems: Some DJ services do what we call
"Multirigging" If a DJ has 10 systems out there, with $100k worth of
karaoke songs each, it's pretty unlikely they invested a million
dollars in karaoke content.

Touting "I have every song, just ask me what you want to sing"

Out of production karaoke sets (7 Bamboo has a set considered a
collectors item, the DK set, since the company stopped producing it in
1996)

Complaints from legitimate karaoke businesses, disc manufacturers, and
karaoke anti piracy groups.

-Final Thoughts:
It's a easily visible, glaring problem in San Jose. Walk into any
karaoke venue, and count the number of songs in their songbook. Does
it seem likely this flake you see running things paid a handsome sum
for their songbook with 50,000 songs? Are they licensed for karaoke?
Send code enforcement over.

I'm not going to be involved in karaoke the rest of my life, but
before I leave I want to leave things in better shape than I found
them. I also don't want this to be a business where the only way to
stay competitive is by pirating content. Right now it's the wild west
in this business everywhere, not just San Jose. Nobody thinks anyone
is ever going to do any checking, so it's important that we regulate
these types of business so the playing field stays level.

I know SJPD has investigated knockoff products and pirated DVD's at
the flea market, let's turn some attention to karaoke. Let San Jose be
the first.

Thank you for your consideration Honorable Mayor and Councilmembers.

Yours Truly,
Robert Cortese

Interesting approach. Keep the updates coming.

Any movement on this with the city?

Just curious.