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RIAA Forgets to Make Royalty Payments
theodp writes "NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer agreed with the RIAA on one point - artists WERE being deprived of money that was rightfully theirs. But Spitzer managed to find $50 million for performers without shaking down grandmothers. Spitzer's culprits? A Who's Who of the nation's top recording companies - members of the RIAA - who failed to maintain contact with artists and stopped making required royalty payments."
the guy's been doing a bang up job as NY DA.
He's really been doing a great job as the Attorney General, too. I'm sure you're right, though, that his days as Assistant DA in NYC were great, too.
He's been doing one hell of a job, though once in a blue moon I think he might let some companies off too easily. AG's do have discretion to do that though.
Besides, NY has a pretty advanced system for getting people in touch with their lost money
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Having the state hold onto unclaimed property is standard procedure is most states. For example contents of safe-deposit boxes are kept by the state for years. The states do their best to locate rightful owners but like most states the unclaimed property departments are understaffed and underfunded so they can't do exhaustive searchs. Also I think that governments are forbidden by law to use the property in any way. So they cannot invest the money.
An exception to unclaimed property is insurance money from a policy. The insurance companies hold onto these while searching for beneficiaries. They CAN invest the money while searching. In some states I think that they have to pay interest when the owner is found, but they don't have to pay all the interest gained.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
RIAA forgets to pay royalties? From the article it was the RIAA lawyer who brought the problem up. The RIAA member companies were not forgetting to pay anyone. They had lost contact with the artists not through any fault of their own, but because the artists had not updated their contact details. Shite - even evil entities are capable of acts of good. In this case the RIAA did the right thing.
The royalties are nothing to the RIAA, the amount the artists receive are about 50 cents out of the average $15 CD. That's why the organized music industry is so strong--they have an extremely vested interest in keeping this atrocious pricing structure intact. The real reason the internet worries the RIAA is that for the first time, artists (like Prince and Pearl Jam) have the ability to completely bypass this archaic distribution system and sell directly to the consumer, without all the associated markups, and receive a larger piece of the pie. Commercial distribution systems like iTunes are actually closer to traditional CD/vinyl sales, at least in their royalty structure.
Disclaimer: I didn't read the article, probably it mentions this...
Actually, the part about this that seems a little funny is the "cannot be found" part of that excerpt. Two of the artists that "couldn't be found" were Dave Matthews and Dolly Parton. Putting aside for a moment the RIAA's claims that "extraorinary measures" were taken to locate the artists, how hard could the recording labels have been looking...? They have websites for God's sake! They give concerts regularly!
Hm. I wasn't mad when I started writing this...
Capitalist bastards.
The principle of escheat has been around for a long time (think English Common Law), at least in real estate. The idea is to prevent any piece of real property from having no owner.
For example, if a person dies with no heirs and no will, that person's property reverts to the state under escheat. Consider what would happen without escheat: the person's property would fall into a legal black hole. It would have no owner and therefore no way of transferring ownership or assigning use rights to third parties.
Usually what happens is that the property in question is placed in escrow while a more in depth search for heirs is done. If the heirs can't be found everything will be sold at auction with the State keeping the proceeds.
AFAIK, the principle works the about the same in all areas outside real estate. IANAL. YMMV.
What I find amazing is that the record companies didn't put a reversion clause in their contracts. That is, if an artist or his/her heirs can't be found, the the royalties revert to the company.
You are attempting to read sigs. Cancel or Allow?
If it works like unclaimed pensions, the state to which one eschetes the money has to do where the business is located/headquartered, not where the person owed lives.
Don't forget that many of us have been boycotting them for several years now. That has to hurt as well. It has also helped some independent guys, in my case anyway. It's hard to keep stats for those guys, but I'd like to see if their revenue has increased over that time.
The money goes to the state where the entity collecting the money is based.
What if I live in Nebraska?
If they can't find you to send you the money, how would they know to send it to Nebraska?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
*rinse* *lather* *repeat*
Ummmm, I think you have a bug in your shampooing code.