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Recording Artists File Brief Against RIAA
Matthew Skala writes: "The Recording Artists' Coalition, which includes such luminaries as Bruce Springsteen, Don Henley, and Sheryl Crow, is still annoyed about the "Work for Hire" legislation we heard about in August 2000. They've filed a brief in the Napster cases, urging the court not to accept the RIAA's copyright registration documents as proof of ownership, because accepting the documents would allow the music cartel to sneakily destroy artists' claims to the music they recorded. They don't take a stand on other issues we might be interested in, but it's still worth thinking about. If the artists are against the RIAA, then whom exactly does the RIAA represent? Some quotes and info are on Siliconvalley.com."
They represent the people who have been exploiting musicians for close to 100 years. They represent the kind of people who would gladly pay someone 500 bucks for "Louie Louie" and make millions of dollars from it without thinking of sharing it with the songwriter. They represent the kind of people who pay radio stations millions of dollars a year to get certain songs played on the airwaves that are supposedly owned by the public. They represent the kind of people who think that paying new bands a wage that could be easily beaten by working at 7-11 is fair. They represent a way of doing business that makes used car salesmen, spammers and morticians blanch at the shamelessness of the bookkeeping and bookcooking. Hollywood, the publishing industry and the Fortune 500, would never consider for a minute some of the crooked gambits that are considered to be business as usual in the music industry.
They do not represent the artists. They do not represent the songwriters. They do not represent the audience of listeners and the people who buy the music. They do not, in any way shape or form, represent or respect American musical culture. When rock and roll came, they tried to bury it. When indy rock came, they tried to bury it and then tried to buy it off. When rap came, they tried to shut it out, and then they perverted it into violent, racial stereotyping. Now that electronica is here, they're doing their damnest to bury it under tons of catchy tunes that are a cross between dance and bubblegum. When home studios became a possibility, they outlawed the cheaper versions of the DATs to make it more expensive for those who wanted to start one - they even tried to get zoning boards in the L.A areas to shut them down for zoning violations. Now that they've waken up to the potential of computers, they are trying to cripple them with copy protection built in to the hardware that will also probably cripple an independent musician's ability to make copies of his OWN music and distribute them.
In short, they are a band of greedy, monopolistic Luddites who are attempting to strangle a new explosion in musical culture before it goes too far.
I think one of the best expressions of how many musicians feel about the industry is Joni Mitchell's "For Free", where she wistfully listens to a guy playing sax on the corner for nothing and wonders if she'll ever feel as happy and pure about her music again.
While I agree that the RIAA needs to see some anti-trust scrutiny, Major League Baseball is acting just as monopolistic as MS or the RIAA. Your statement above shows that you may not have been following the baseball contraction issue as closely as I have.
The baseball situation is that they want to close down the two teams that are making the least money. Reason? The cities won't submit to paying for new baseball parks for the team to play in. Never mind that a spiffy new ball park like Enron in Houston, or PacBell in San Francisco cost between $500 million and $1 billion to build.
If the taxpayers resist paying for it, the team threatens to move. If they move (or in this case, just disappear) the league always says "you'll have first pick in future expansion opportunities", but any time you bring in expansion baseball, the league demands an "Expansion fee" from the city.
The dillemma these people have is that they can either be extorted for $500 million for a stadium now and keep the team, or get a new team in 10 years when the economy is better, still have to build a stadium for whatever a stadium costs in 2011, and also pay an "expansion fee".
In any other business, this is a shakedown. But it's the worst kind of shakedown, it's a shakedown for TAX money.
Who did what now?
It is in the interest of all of us creative types to have it reinforced that the US Constitution requires that copyright go to authors and not to some faceless corporate behemoth.
fwiw
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I am not a lawyer ... blah, blah, blah,
but it does nothing to the Napster case. If I understand what I read correctly the artists are laying claim to authorship rights of the works in question. As someone else has pointed out, this means that if they have authorship rights, the recording label can retain the copyrights to a particular instance of a work, but not all instances.
The reason the artists want this in this case is quite simple - it enables an end-run around the RIAA represented record labels. The artists could record versions of their songs specifically for things like Napster or other mediums and potentially cut the labels out of the revenue stream (the label could not claim ownership of that instance of the work). Obviously RIAA would not be very happy with that.
Again, I am not a lawyer and may be missing a few subtle points of the law.
But for the Napster case in particular it does nothing. Even if the artists' brief is upheld and the documents are amended or refiled, the labels still own the copyrights to the instances of the work (music) in question (as agreed to by contract). That means that if their claims of infringement are upheld, they can still show damages as the owner of the copyrights to that particular recording.
A decent play by the RAC. If it is successful, it will change the landscape somewhat, but I fear all it would mean for Napster would be that a different party would be suing them.
Here's what renowned cryptography guru Bruce Schneier has to say about the DMCA (emphasis mine):
---
[...] Dmitry Sklyarov (age 27) landed in jail because the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes publishing critical research on this technology a more serious offense than publishing nuclear weapon designs. Just how did the United States of America end up with a law protecting the entertainment industry at the expense of freedom of speech? And how did the entertainment industry end up with stronger laws protecting their content than the information on constructing nuclear weapons?
[...]
Welcome to 21st century America, where the profits of the major record labels, movie houses, and publishing companies are more important than First Amendment rights or nuclear weapons information. (The more you look at the problem, the weirder it becomes. "The New York Times" has the legal right to publish secret government documents, unless they are protected by a digital copy-protection scheme, in which case publishing them would lead to an FBI raid.)
[...]
The entertainment industry is behaving the same way. The DMCA is unconstitutional, but they don't care. Until it's ruled unconstitutional, they've won. The charges against Sklyarov won't stick, but the chilling effect it will have on other researchers will. If they can scare software companies, ISPs, programmers, and T-shirt manufacturers (Hollywood has sued CopyLeft for publishing the DeCSS code on a T-shirt) into submission, they've won for another day. The entertainment industry is fighting a holding action, and fear, uncertainty, and doubt are their weapons. We need to win this, and we need to win it quickly. Please support those who are fighting these cases in the courts: the EFF and others. Every day we don't win is a loss.
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Read the full text here.
Raymond
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
We didn't, but the RIAA has been claiming that the reason they're against Napster et al is due to the harm done to the artists. Possibly they're thinking that the average person in the street would have more sympathy for the artists than the price fixing consortium.
Well, Clearly the RIAA does not represent artists; one need only examine the title for which the acronym stands to know that.
The major 'non-profits' that represent the artist interests would be the PRO's such as ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, etc. These are the groups that sell blanket liscenses for broadcasting to the major networks, cable, radio, as well as bars, restaurants, and stores. Unfortunately for the artists, the PRO's are run primarily by boards whose members have significant stakes elsewhere in the recording industry... Hence the need for groups like the RAC.
> Can anyone explain to me how a court of law can find a giant
> monopolistic music/entertainment/whatever it's bought recently company
> can be granted the rights to music over the artist who wrote it?
If the court is presented with a document stating that the artist signs over rights to the work created, the court has no choice. Most, if not all, recording contracts have a clause like this. This is not to say that it's fair, but the court has to assume that the contract was willingly entered by both parties (in the absence of proof of coercion). Since the artist signs (and then does not successfully press coercion charges), the law is clear.
The question that you must ask now is why so many artists sign contracts that give rights to their works to these companies. There are many other posts that address this issue, and I lack the time to approach this now, but the simple answer to your question is that the court finds for the company because the artist gave the rights to the company.
Virg
It's not a loan, it's a "recoupable expense".
Band X signs with Label Y. The terms of the contract are almost always this: $XX,XXX advance plus X% of net sales ("net" meaning after deducting reserves, promo copies, returns, and the cost of goods sold).
The advance and any other monies committed for recording or tour support are recoupable; the record company gets that money back from sales before Band X sees a dime (other than mechanical and performance royalties that are independent of the contract).
If the record stiffs, which 90% of them do, there's no loan collector banging on the door. It's worse than that: the band has the "smell of death" and no other label will come near them. It's 7-11 time, kids. Thank you, come again.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
> RIAA Represents the Recording Industry...
... didn't expect to get rich off royalties and licensing fees.
. html - was written in 1994, before Napster or the DCMA.
Exactly. http://riaa.com/About-Who.cfm
> It wasn't that long ago when artists
Most artists don't. Even relatively successful artists who thought they were going to make money sometimes find it doesn't work that way - the RIAA members make the money, the bands don't.
This article - http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/problemwithmusic
"The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 millon dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month."
rant