CD Price-Fixing Suit Ruling

Jay Langhurst writes "As the AP reported Friday, if you filed a claim before March 3, 2003 online or otherwise you'll be getting a gift in the mail from those monopolistic music companies in the form of a check for about $13!"

Comments

When....

[Nagatzhul]

do they lower the prices?

Re:$13.00!

[Master Bait]

I'm going to donate my $13 to the EFF.

Use the money

[Trolling4Dollars]

to send a donation to xiph.org or towards the purchase of software that uses Ogg Vorbis. That will really screw their plans if enough of us do it.

Wow, a whole $13

[Schlemphfer]

I'm looking forward to receiving my $13. I bought a hundred or so CDs between 1988 and last year, so I figure this check covers about 1% of the total I've been overcharged. In any case, the recording industry will never get another nickel from me. The RIAA disgusts me so much that I've stopped buying new CD's entirely. Now I just buy used, listen to it a while, and sell it. The money I save goes to seeing the musicians I like perform locally, and sometimes to buying higher margin stuff at their shows, like T-shirts and so forth.

We've got the recording industry in a vulnerable spot. It's time to withhold cash from them and go in for the kill.

what ever you do, don't buy a cD!

[pioneer]

Yeah yeah... 13$ is about the price of a CD... so whatever you don't feed it right back into the machine that is the RIAA... instead go donate it to a good cause like the couple below (no affiliation)

boycott-riaa.com

digital-consumer.org

do something useful and fight this idiotic RIAA crap!

Re:what ever you do, don't buy a cD!

[linuxbaby]

That's like saying 'Never buy software' because you don't like Microsoft.

At CD Baby we work directly with 38,000 musicians (NO record labels) that are selling their music direct to the world.

Just like we should all support the independent programming projects when possible, you should support independent music so that these big record labels will have to reinvent themselves or die.

Hurt the record labels, not the musicians themselves. Do a musician a favor. Bypass the labels. Buy direct . (My little store alone has paid over $3 million directly to musicians in the last couple years.)

(See our flavor galleries for some real creative browsing.)

Only $13?

[Anonymous Coward]

I own about 500 CDs. $13.00 works out to about two and a half cents per CD. Is that all they were gouging me for?

Stop seeing it as a $13 issue

[MoThugz]

It's actually $45.5 million out of RIAA pockets in total. Sure, not that much considering the size of RIAA. But at least they'll feel the pinch.

Now that we have precedence, maybe there should be waves upon waves of this class action. If there is relentless waves of such cases, hopefully the RIAA will get the point, and look at other distribution models more carefully...

Not that I'm holding my breath anyway.

Re:Stop seeing it as a $13 issue

[alienw]

You can't have 'waves upon waves' of suits for the same issue. The case has been settled. It's over. You can't sue them again, unless you excluded yourself from the class action.

Also, it IS a $13.00 issue. Let's see, the recording industry got at least hundreds of dollars from almost every person here ($100 = about 7 or 8 CDs). A few will get $13.00 back. Who wins, you or the RIAA?

Also, a $45M settlement is pennies for the RIAA. They will not feel anything. They would feel the pain if this was 2 billion or even 500 million, but not for $45M.

$13?

[NoInfo]

Umm, only $13? Good thing 'we' 3.5 million people settled this case.

The real winners here, of course, are the lawyers. A large portion of the remaining $23.3 million goes to them.

Just a hunch, but I imagine it comes out to a tad more than $13 for each for them.

IANAL, but right now I wish I was.

Re:RTFA

[$carab]

That's right.

So everyone who's getting the money has agreed that the music companies didn't fix prices.

In effect, if you're getting that 13 dollar check, don't bitch about the cost of CDs, you lost that right when you agreed to the settlement.

They want what for $13?

[pherris]

From "Questions and Answers" :

Include your full name, business name if you are filing on behalf of a business, your complete address, your telephone number with area code, your date of birth, including the year, and the last four digits of your Social Security Number.

There doesn't seem that be any mention about what happens to this data after the settlement. Is it legal for someone connected to this action to sell it?

That's ok, keep your money and I'll settle my claim via kazaa.

Re:$13.00!

[NetCurl]

Or....

How abotu when the government finds out that 5 major labels have been colluding to fix the prices on CDs, they make them all give $13 to whoever signs up, and then shake hands and say "All in a day's work," and nothing changes? That is paltry in response for how long it went on before we found out. Is that promoting capitalism or consumerism? Competition? Or the fleecing of America (and the world?!?) by people who have enough money to influence the government? When do the people wake up and realize it's not fair, and they keep voting along party lines for people that are only harming them?

Re:$13.00!

[mbogosian]

amazon.com has a running promotion of no s&p if you order more than (I think) 30$. That's 3 cds...

Amazon also makes it very easy to buy used CDs at significantly less. To all you folks out there, you should be buying used whenever possible (which means almost always). If it's a new release you want, wait two days and somebody will be selling it on Amazon used (just click on the "XX used & new from $X.XX" link under "more buying options" on the right side of any product page).

This is the real way to send a message to the RIAA: don't buy their product; -or- if you have to buy their product, buy it so they don't make any revenue on the sale. If you want the artist to get money, buy the CD used, then go to the artist's webpage (most have them) and send what you saved when buying a used CD directly to the artist as a gift; it will be more than what they would have made on a new CD sale.

Re:Actually...

[Justus]

You misunderstood the point of the original poster.

The article said that the RIAA was paying out $12.63 to more than 3.5 million consumers, so it's paying at least 44.2 million dollars.

The parent of the original poster was commenting that sending the $13 back to the kid whose life savings was taken away was just returning his own money; however, that $12000 only comprises 0.0000271% of the total settlement, so I highly doubt they're somehow covering it all with it.