The Performing Right Society (PRS) has “commenced legal proceedings” against Steam owner Valve over the use of its members’ works on Steam “without permission.”
The organization claims that while games right across the spectrum use music to “transform play into emotional, immersive experiences,” Valve has “never obtained a licence for its use of the rights managed by PRS on behalf of its members, comprising songwriters, composers, and music publishers.”
PRS claims “many game titles which incorporate PRS members’ musical works are made available on Steam,” including “high profile series” such as Forza Horizon, FIFA/EA FC, and GTA.
PRS said that as it had sought to work with Valve about the licensing issues “for many years without appropriate engagement from Valve,” it has now issued legal proceedings under the UK’s s20 Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988 and requires any game that uses PRS’ works to obtain a licence.
“The litigation will progress unless Valve Corporation engages positively with discussions and takes the necessary license to cover the use of PRS repertoire, both retrospectively and moving forwards,” the organization said in a press statement.
Dan Gopal, chief commercial officer, PRS for Music said: "Our members create music that enhances experiences and PRS exists to protect the value of their work with integrity, transparency, and fairness. Legal proceedings are not a step we take lightly, but when a business’s actions undermine those principles, we have a duty to act.
“Great video games rely on great soundtracks, and the songwriters and creators behind them deserve to have their contribution recognised and fairly valued.”
Meanwhile, big AI vacuums up the entirety of music produced by everyone from piracy sites for profit and noone bats an eye
Isn’t this kind of like suing blockbuster over music in the films they rent? Seems a bit daft, but there must be a reason they think it might succeed.
It seems similar to the idea that you could sue Google for copyright infringement because it serves a website that infringes copyright. Like… valve just serves the content and facilitates sale, right? The act of infringement wasn’t committed by them, it was committed by the game developers. Am I mistaken?
I don’t really understand this, but that’s exactly what it seems like.
If they win, they set a precedent and then start suing everyone. If they lose, they don’t lose much.
There have been so many lawsuits against Valve recently from so many different angles. I’m not usually one for conspiracy but I wouldn’t be shocked if this is a coordinated campaign to unseat Valve from their monopoly on the PC gaming market so that other games industry corporations can move in. They’ve been trying and failing to break into this market for years because Valve has built so much consumer loyalty.
If it isn’t publicly traded, they can’t take over it, enshitify it, and squeeze it until it’s useless. So of course they hate it.
Microsoft is looking to butt in on the pc gaming market with their new Xbox project I wonder if it has something to do with that.
What even is this lawsuit? Can somebody help me understand the accusation(s)?
Because it kind of reads like “you sell games that have our music, and don’t pay us” which obviously makes no sense. Most of the article is absolute fluff.
P1: prs is suing valve.
P2: valve doesn’t have a license to… Do what? Is this extortion?
P3: prs music is on steam.
P4: valve ignores us. We want to sue them for infringing “the UK’s s20 copyright, designs, patents act 1988”
P5: musicians work hard. Prs protec.
P6: music important. Musicians important.
Sounds a lot like a license troll. Probably the specific court and potential violation of a law were picked with care. Perhaps they looked through valve’s terms in advance to find a loophole, design their own terms to exploit that etc.
I don’t think it’s a troll. I think it’s specifically game publishers trying to carve out a niche and get more power to make more money, both from valve, and on their own digital distribution platforms by saying
“valve needs to pay us to sell our games because we are the license holders. And since we are the license holders, we can pay ourselves from sales on our own platforms”
So I think it’s dumb on the surface, but ultra shitty underneath.
Like if they win, that’s a bad precedent.
If they lose, that’s still precedent.
And in the process, there’s a SHIT TON of discovery, of a company that doesn’t give out much information that competitors would love to get their hands on. Because if you know how a competitor operates, you can undermine them. Knowledge is power. It’s super pathetic, but also scary, like a demon trying to figure out your style so they can steal your friends. Hopefully, we can rely on " just don’t be shitty" to hold up.
All of these lawsuits popping up are like a distributed attack on Valve.
Oh I thought it was actually unlawful to stream the music of a game, thanks
It can be. If you look on a lot of the websites for video games they grant licenses to stream the game’s audio assets in the context of streaming gameplay.
If they sued games like Beat Hazard for letting players use their own music in the game, that’d be like suing a media player for letting people play music with it.
So imagine how much dumber this is.
Steam will win against these trolls who spend more time in press releases and patient trolling …than doing anything of worth.
Shouldn’t they be suing the game publishers not the reseller?
So EA and Microsoft according to their docket?
No because they have a license to use the music already. They are seeking the equivalent of performance rights from Steam. They are extortionists.
Yes we’ve had first rights payments, but what about seconds rights payments??
What about second breakfast? I’m not sure they know about second breakfast Pippin…
For the people that don’t see how manufactured some of the attacks against Valve have been lately (not that this will help convince them regardless…)
Looking through the things PRS does, I wonder why anyone would join. Why call yourself an artist when you contribute to an entity that stops people from playing music to animals or whistling to themselves?
Like seriously. It’s a group of artists going around shutting down parties. Musicians telling everyone to go home. Probably thinking “it’s not my fault, it’s the industry, if I want my fair share I HAVE to bully individuals and small businesses.”
I think that these might be the same people who drove around to catch petrol and service stations playing the radio so that they could sue them for unlicensed public performance. This was right in the Napster days.
They’re an extortion racket for large music recording labels, who generally fuck over small music venues and individual musicians.
Dan Gopal, chief commercial officer, PRS for Music said: "Our members create music that enhances experiences and PRS exists to protect the value of their work with integrity, transparency, and fairness. Legal proceedings are not a step we take lightly, but when a business’s actions undermine those principles, we have a duty to act.
tl;dr they’re after the money.
This outfit is doing RIAA moves and surely annoying as those IP litigators whose business is to let loose bots and flag anything with a DMCA that remotely smacks of what they define as piracy.
I feel like by this logic Amazon and Walmart would also need to obtain lisences to sell video games that have music in them…
That or I’m too tired and bread dead to understand the stupid shit I just read.
Big bread over here psyoping me into eating toasted and buttered crispy steamy salty spurdough chewy bread
The only way I can see this being different is steam shows preview videos of the game which have music.
Amazon often only shows the box it sells in and pictures.
Its still stupid because the game developer has the rights and that page is their place.
Yeah but isn’t there a bunch of fine print when you put your game on steam saying “you allow us to ADVERTISE AND PLATFORM YOUR FUCKING GAME SO THAT IT SELLS”
If I remember correctly, Walmart does have televisions up in the tech department displaying advertisements and trailers for movies and games.
And Amazon often has a video in the image caroussel
As a general rule of thumb if something sounds stupid then it’s probably been reported badly with some key information missing. I’m betting the music industry press reporting will be very different from that of a site called “gamesindustry.biz”.
I’ve seen a lot of stupid patent and copyright trolling over the years.
I bet 100€ that they’re trying to double dip and get valve to also pay for licensing songs that the individual game publishers already licensed.
Here’s a music news site: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/gaming-giant-steam-faces-legal-action-from-the-uks-prs-over-alleged-unlicensed-use-of-music-in-games/
It sounds every bit as stupid there, if not more so because it’s apparently a normal aspect of distribution licensing in the UK.
Game developers and publishers typically secure sync licences to cover the embedding of music in their titles.
However, in the UK, those sync deals do not extend to the making available of that music when games are subsequently distributed via download or streaming platforms.
The ‘communication to the public’ right — i.e. the making available right — sits with PRS, not individual music publishers, meaning Valve requires its own separate licence as the platform operator distributing games that contain PRS members’ works.
bread dead
… Wha?
I can assure you that I’m still alive and do not currently hunger for brains of the living.
“The litigation will progress until Valve obeys” sounds an awful lot like extortion.
They are clearly trying to double/triple dip on shit that already been paid for and licensed.
Whats next?
Make us individual game owners pay license every time we download and install the game?
Lest we forget, Unity tried to do just that and walked back due to backlash.
Unity never tried that? They wanted to charge the developer using Unity. It was stupid, but they pay for unity one way or another.
Make us individual game owners pay license every time we download and install the game?
This is how it’s been done for decades now? Every game you purchase off of Steam, Xbox, PlayStation is just a license to play that game.
Really?
I don’t recall having to pay a fee every time I redownload or reinstall my game…ever
Suggest reading into software licensing and understand the different types of licenses that could be used.
Sure buddy.
Username checks out.
Yeah, like isn’t this steam’s schtick? You give up a third of the purchases for them to just handle this kinda shit? I’m not defending them, just stating.
Edit: hive mind activated.
Steam is a game Plattform, not a game publisher
Half life 3 fans in shambles.
real disappointed all that HL3 hype a month or 3 back ultimately ended up being a big fat fart of nothing.
First time?
nope. Just a frustrated, blueballed gamer sick and tired of shit ending in clifhangers with no finish.
Doent help that valve have openly admitted in the past that they have little interest in making games outside of experiments to play with new technologies, who cares about the players invested in the narratives they’ve created and refuse to bring any conclusion too.
3 back
Confirmed!
With Game publisher I meant that Steam neither published GTA, nor any other games listed there
Next in convenience store owners and employees need to get a music license for selling CDs and DVDs so the public.
Apparently PRS already took it to another level by threatening an employee for singing to herself at the store she worked at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/8317952.stm
What fuck that company lost their goddamn minds. Wonder they are fucking stupid enough to sue YouTube for something similar. Maybe because Google billion dollar corporation that would bankrupt them.
Lets hope judge smart enough to throw this lawsuit out, and they have to go bankrupt due to a counter suit.
Wonder they are fucking stupid enough to sue YouTube for something similar.
They don’t/no longer need to, YouTube has content ID and copyright claims.
This whole thing is utter bullshit. It sounds like the game studios DO have a license, and they’re claiming that Steam does not but should. Because you can’t tell me that Microslop, EA, and Rockstar, three ENORMOUS giants in the gaming industry, have willingly opened themselves up to litigation by not licensing music in their games, something they’ve been making for decades. Why are they entitled to a license from the developer AND a license from the shop selling it? Of course, they’re not, but let’s hope this doesn’t set precedent that says they are.
Next logical step would be to sue producers of radios, speakers, headphones and so on, I assume. Their devices “perform” the music, after all.
And then they can sue hospitals for helping bringing new ears into the world.
You joke, but this is actually how it works in places. As recently as 2015 we paid some % of all storage media sales (think HDDs, nvmes, flash drives, anything that can hold data really) to our RIAA equivalent to ”compensate for private copying”. Now it’s no longer baked into the prices, but they are paid directly by the government, as in through taxation.
Love this. If the dev needs a license to play it, Steam needs a license to sell it, is it really much different for them to then sue owners for not purchasing a license to listen?
Cyberpunk 2077 has an option specifically for streamers to not play music in that touchy area. I know project red is big but not quite as big as those other guys, and even they had a mind to protect themselves and other public personalities.
IIRC it’s because the streamer can’t play the music to people, since they don’t have the license for that, the game has the license to play the music, not the streamer.
Streamer mode is typically for one of two usecases:
- The streamer plays their own music, so being able to silence all game music simplifies things
- The game might contain copyrighted music by known artists, which can trigger automated enforcement. In most jurisdictions music used in a game is fine to stream/record because it’s covered by the developer’s/distributor’s license, but that doesn’t stop overzealous rights holders from placing bogus claims that can muck up your revenue, so it’s easier to just not play music that you don’t yourself have license to play
That makes sense.
That’s because your Stream/Video on Youtube/Twitch/Whatever will be deleted and your account flagged if the algorithm detects copyright protected audio in it.
