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is a remixed midi file an original creation?

Or is it simply a copied work with the rights belonging to the original author?

Is it Piracy?

What do the you think?

downhillbattle.org is not a credible source. Nice try googling. Give it another shot. And you've managed to sidestep the parental post completely. It doesn't matter how big of a percentage per song. It matters how much cash per song. Even if your googletistic is correct, the record labels are taking 65% of 99 cents. Do you think the artist is seeing any of that?

Best Buy sells their CDs below cost, by the way, as a loss leader to get people into their stores, so that's not the stellar example you wish it were. Check out Record Contract Basics for more detail. The band is lucky to see $1 on a full-priced %16.98 sold at retail.

Bottom line, if you want to support the artists, attend their concerts and buy merchandise straight from them -- that's the only way they see any reasonable amount of money.

Then you wouldn't get the contract. Do you even know what "work-for-hire" means? The hiring party would own the copyright in such a situation. Thus it would be theirs to put in the public domain if they so wished.

While you may think that everything paid by taxes should belong to you personally, consider that while roads are paid out of taxes and usage fees, you don't own them in the sense that you have the right to use them as you please. You buy a house, you can use it as you please (even then, within some basic guidelines). You pay taxes that builds a school, you will get arrested for trespassing if you try to enter it at will. Not many people would argue that charging people with trespassing for breaking into a public school is wrong. Paying your taxes doesn't buy you rights to use the tax-purchased properties at your discretion.

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Irrelevant, and a red herring.

Copyright law defines something as a work for hire if it was produced by an individual at the request of a company. All rights to a work for hire are retained by the company who paid for the work to be created.

Most of the employee contracts are supplemental to this definition. Many companies claim all rights to works created by employees without the explicit request of the company, as well.

I thought that all new music is a work for hire.

In a parallel thread, it mentions that all recordings made by RIAA-signed artists are works for hire. They are not protecting the artists' copyrights in this case but their own, as it is published recordings that the artist made for them as works for hire, not actual songs, whose copyrights they are attempting to enforce. In the case of older music produced before that damnable work for hire provision was added by the US Congress in 1999, any contract that any band or artist signed with a major label would have required that they give up all copyright ownership to their recordings. Copyrights assigned this way revert back to them after 35 years, of course, but nonetheless, almost none of the music at issue here is THAT old--U2's earliest recordings come from 1980, about 23 years old, so the record company still holds the copyright. I suppose this is why you don't see a song like the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night", whose copyright supposedly reverted back to McCartney (and probably jointly to Lennon's estate) a couple of years ago, listed in the document.

Yes, you are right, the copyright holder must give specific authorization, but in most cases this specific authorization has been implicitly given by the contract signed by the artist. For works after 1999, the record labels hold all the copyrights as if they wrote the songs and performed them themselves, due to the work for hire provision. In this case they ARE the copyright holders, as much as a newspaper company owns the copyrights to an article written by its staff.

In 1991's Biz Markie vs. Gilbert O'Sullivan debacle, Markie lost his case and O'Sullivan was awarded punitive damages.

In the United States, any sampling is considered a violation of copyright.

Most MP3 files downloaded via a P2P service are illegal no matter what. However, possession of a copy of one of these recordings is illegal even if you have purchased a CD because they're "derivative works" of 1. a musical work and 2. a sound recording. Copyright owners have won infringement lawsuits over four notes from a musical work and over one note from a sound recording. (The latter link will tell you that the four-note rule does not apply, but the four-note rule applies to musical works, which are independent of any recording of such works.)

When there are fewer than 50,000 possible melodies, how can anybody write new music? "Apparently, they just do" does not answer the question.

The rules for books are quite different, and a publishing company generally does not take ownership of the music. They simply have exclusive publishing rights for some period of time.

Actually, thanks to a rider in the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act of 1999, contracts for audio recordings now default to work for hire. Several people made a big stink about it, but not until it was already passed. In fact, it consists of 4 words added quietly by a person who now works for the RIAA. So, yes they have "exclusive publishing rights for some period of time". Forever.

It would be ideal to have the money from sales go to the artist. I would say this would never happen (because of past history) but $67 billion is a lot of money. I hope they pull it off. Even if it doesn't work out it will be nice to see the music industry shaken up a little. Hopefully the days of record labels raping artists is close to being over.

Artists today make virtually nil on CD sales anyway - the record industry takes 90% or more.

I found a good resource on record contracts that shows how badly artists are ripped off by the record companies. Particularly interesting I thought was the section on "recoupment" - where a band must first pay for all the costs of recording their album before they get a royalty check! So the band are being "commissioned" to produce artwork that they themselves in the end fund, but will never themselves own!

Who makes the money? Don't be fooled: the people who market the music make money, not the people who create it. Period.