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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Its just unreasonable to expect spotify to be able to afford that when they already barely pay musicians.

    The audiobooks help them pay even less for music:

    With the introduction of the stand-alone audiobooks offering, Spotify is now able to pay lower music-licensing rates for the music-and-audiobook bundle, introduced in the U.S. in November 2023. The 2022 settlement agreement between the National Music Publishers Assn. and streaming services includes a carveout for bundles (such as Amazon Prime and Apple Music + Apple News), which the new audiobook offering falls under. Such plans lower the mechanical licensing rates the company pays in the U.S. Spotify’s lower royalty rates are retroactive to March 1, 2024.

    However, NMPA president-CEO David Israelite had strong words for the move when contacted for comment by Variety. “It appears Spotify has returned to attacking the very songwriters who make its business possible,” he wrote. “Spotify’s attempt to radically reduce songwriter payments by reclassifying their music service as an audiobook bundle is a cynical, and potentially unlawful, move that ends our period of relative peace. We will not stand for their perversion of the settlement we agreed upon in 2022 and are looking at all options.” The NMPA and streaming services resolved a years-long standoff over royalty rates with a Copyright Royalty Board ruling in 2022, and agreed upon a new rate of 15.35% for the 2023-2027 period.



  • The standard fine for violating the STOCK Act is $200, but frequently the House Committee on Ethics and the Senate Select Committee on Ethics waive the fee.

    Craig Holman, a Capitol Hill lobbyist on ethics and campaign finance rules for nonprofit Public Citizen, said the fee is one of two reasons why the STOCK Act is frequently violated.

    “The penalty is so minimal that these millionaire members of Congress really don’t care about it," Holman told Raw Story. “The second provision is the ethics committees are not really enforcing it or taking it seriously.”

    So basically this “law” is just a suggestion.












  • Careful. There are quite a few terms of service that you’ve agreed to over the years that if certain aspects of them were enforced, you wouldn’t think they were very reasonable.

    Epic has an entire legal department to read over agreements like that, and yet they deliberately breached the terms. That’s hugely different from someone unknowingly breaching a TOS that they didn’t read.



  • This isn’t some random developer, it’s a developer that has already breached a contract with Apple. It’s reasonable for Apple to be wary of entering into another contract with them when the CEO is publicly complaining about the terms.

    There’s definitely a case to be made that Epic shouldn’t need an Apple developer account to make their own app store, but Apple is well within its rights to deny them an account based on their history.


  • Apple said one of the reasons they terminated our developer account only a few weeks after approving it was because we publicly criticized their proposed DMA compliance plan. Apple cited this X post from this thread written by Tim Sweeney. Apple is retaliating against Epic for speaking out against Apple’s unfair and illegal practices, just as they’ve done to other developers time and time again.

    Epic breached the terms of its agreements with Apple and Google to kick off its lawsuits against them in 2020, and now that Sweeney is openly complaining about Apple’s terms for third-party app stores Apple doesn’t trust Epic not to breach those too. Seems reasonable.