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Music Industry Pays $67M Fine For Price Fixing
Krelnik writes "Reuters is reporting that the music industry is paying a $67.4 Million settlement to end a lawsuit where they were accused of artificially inflating CD prices at retail. Yeah, P2P is causing their problems. Sure, sure it is. Here's the story at Reuters UK."
I'm sure the RIAA will be quite upset at losing that less than 1% of their annual income. Poor sods. But I think if judgements continue like this, and that moronic bill for "P2P warfare" is dropped, a real dent might be made in the RIAA's empire of art commodification.
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Is it just me, or does this seem like a reallllly low amount of money for a settlement in a judgement this serious? Not to complain about the victory, but shouldn't this have much greater consequences than what ultimately boils down to a weekly paycheck for these CEO's?
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They are just paying their way and donating CDs to certain organizations just to say drop the suit... that's it.
"This is a landmark settlement to address years of illegal price-fixing," Spitzer said in a statement. "Our agreement will provide consumers with substantial refunds
No it won't! The suit was filed two years ago. $67.4M divided over all the CDs distributed by the labels ends up being fewer than pennies per consumer. At best, I'd expect little more than a $5 coupon off my next overpriced music purchase. The settlement also doesn't do anything to address future infringement.
and result in the distribution of a wide variety of recordings for use in our schools and communities."
Not under today's Fair Use laws...
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Probably not if you're from a country where "checque" is standard spelling. From the article: "The settlement will go to all 50 states, based on population. Consumers may be able to seek compensation."
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NO this seems like an awefully small amount of money. Does 67M approach the amount they profitted off of the price fixing? It should be at least that amount, plus a punative amount.
$67M is a Joke. A single company could foot that.
I was thinking that also, they overcharged $480 million, and only had to pay back $67 million.
Gotta love that logic.
So now the local indy shops that can't match the $8 a CD that the big chains can sell for will go under. They're already more expensive, but it just got pointless for them to even try.
It'll be like bookstores all over again.
That may be, but the problem with class action suits is that they are almost always brought in order to benefit the lawyers. It's rare indeed that the actual plaintiffs in such suits gain anything significant from them. Often the plaintiffs end up with a settlement that represents less than what they lost at the hands of the defendant. But the settlement amount is usually large enough that the lawyers representing the plaintiffs make enough to retire to a life of complete luxury.
Remember: the lawyers representing you in a class action lawsuit don't work for you: they work for themselves, and are just using you as a tool to gain for themselves insane amounts of money.
What that means in this case is that if the RIAA offers to settle early for $100 million, the lawyers will probably take the deal, because their cut will be something like 30% of that, and $30 million for a small group of lawyers is a lot of money if the amount of time it represents is small. They know that if they don't take the deal, the RIAA has the resources to drag the case out for decades if need be, so they'll take the deal. And the RIAA is thus still ahead a cool $300 million.
If there's another boot to fall, it'll be something other than a class action lawsuit. And if you want an idea of the likely long-term outcome, just look at the tobacco companies and how much they were "hurt" in the end (hint: not much) by the class action lawsuits.
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"The RIAA did not make a cent off the price fixing, as that had no effect on wholesale prices."
Then..
"won't buy the CD for our stores unless you sell it to us for $2 less than normal wholesale"
Erm.. so better retail price competition will affect wholesale price and yet wholesale price is not affected. Bravo!
Liberty.