How Google is Building A Crowdsourced PRO with No Antitrust Supervision

As anyone knows who has dealt with YouTube, the much ballyhooed Content ID database really is horrendous.   This is particularly true on the music publishing side.  And of course, Google uses its market power to refuse the industry standard audit right to independent songwriters–you know, those songwriters who are subject to compulsory mechanical licenses and whose performance royalties are subject to government oversight.  To protect Google from the antitrust lusting of songwriters.

Witness the typical Google royalty statements which many of the songwriters and publishers among you received recently.  That statement comes with a cover letter asking the songwriters to fix Google’s skanky data:

As you can read for yourself, Google is asking that the music publishers and songwriters to fix their data–essentially to act as “mechanical turks” to crowdsource the job of building an asset for Google.  This is the usual Google-style shakedown.  Build a monopoly on the…