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Kansas AG Rejects Settlement Discs
RWarrior(fobw) writes "Kansas's Attorney General has rejected 1600 CDs by 25 different artist as part of the music industry's anti-trust settlement. Is this a community values issue, a censorship issue, or just crap music being foisted off onto the public as part of a meaningless settlement?"
What's with all these new records these days? I'm still content with my Weird Al - Bad Hair Day album.
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Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter removed 5,300 discs, or 5 percent of the 107,000 his state was scheduled to receive.
And those where just Britney Spears CDs too!
More on topic though, it seems almost like they send the states whatever they have sitting in a warehouse without any rhyme or reason. A lot of those CDs *shouldn't* be in libraries imho.
I wonder if the settlement was for Books-On-Cd as well, as that would of been a welcome addition to the blind and near-blind library patrons.
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What use would the state of Kansas have for 1600 CDs, many of which are duplicates? The only logical thing would be to put them in libraries and allow the citizens to borrow them so they can rip them onto their hard drives and share them as MP3s. When will the RIAA learn to be responsible and not only help out their customers but also themselves. I can buy DVDs and many computer or video game titles for less money than a new CD. Not that I would be particularly compelled to buy the latest CD anyways, there has been nothing but junk for the past few years when it comes to music.
The "settlement" as we have seen in other articles is crap. Most of the cd's are from groups that no one wants to listen to.
As a parent in Kansas, I think the AG is right to refuse some of the cd's. I watch what my kids listen to (my older kids listen to all kinds of rap)..but not my young daughters.
If the record companies are pissed...so be it. They lost...didn't they?
I'm glad they don't read the books as well, there are authors with sentiments far more violent and twisted than any 90's pop act.
I actually have a lot of respect for Kline whose department restricted the discs. (I live in Kansas)
I listen to a local radio station called 96.5 the buzz, and every friday they do a "current events" day, where people call in.
Well, people started to call in about the CD's incident and bashing it for censorship.
Then a really weird thing happened, the two Junior DJ's got a call from Phill Kline. They did an on the spot interview on why he was censoring them.
I guess what it came down to was that his general rule was
"If the CD has a track that is about violence against women, or the degredation of women, and promotes youth violence then the entire CD needs to be removed"
He said that he supported his staff, because it would look worse for him to allow CD's that had violence in them, than to allow them through.
Since his department was responsible for handling the donations, they were responsible for the content, unlike a situation where the Library system was responsible.
I think this is a good case of Covering his ass, espeically in an environment where everyone is hunting for some moral reason to remove someone, instead of taking factors such as freedom of speech into play etc.
The problem is, I am not as good as explaining his position as he was, and so this is probably going to recieve some replies that were answered well by him in the interview, but I am doing my best to explain where he was coming from.
He did what he felt was important, since this was an issue of a dispersment which he was responsible for.
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The settlement CDs should be rejected because they are mostly unsold crap the labels couldn't sell. Rejecting them because "the albums .. did not mesh with the values of a majority of Kansans" is blatent censorship. Censoring material is right up there with the corporate BS that the RIAA pushes around. You, Mr. Phill Kline, are a very bad man.
Censorship is censorship, no matter how you try to disguise it.
Quit throwing around heavy word when they're not needed. The Kansas AG did not say they were banning any of those CDs. He said they were making sure that the state government was not giving out materials that people might find objectionable. The Kansas Librarians' Association had no objections.
Now, if you can find a link to an article about the Kansas AG forcing a library to remove or not carry certain materials, then come back with the word censorship. Until then, quit screaming about nothing. Otherwise, no one will pay attention when you scream about something important.
The real issue here is with the settlemens in general, not the specific CD's.
The record companies settled for millions of dollars. They decided to pay this with CD's. In the deal, the CDs were presumably valued at market price.
Whoa! Hold on, the record companies do not pay anywhere near market value for any of the CDs. They pay for the production costs, which sure a hell ain't $16 a CD; more like $0.50.
So this really wasn't any sort of punishment for the recording industry. More like a lesson that they could do whatever the hell they want and "repay" their debt to society with worthless crap.
Well, most notably this is NOT censorship. It's a reasonable rejection by Kansas of crap foisted onto them in the form of a "settlement". The hubris of the music industry in their passing off inventory as fodder for art as value would be laughable were it not so egregious and offensive.
Here in the state of Washington, the CD's provided were highlighted in the local news with local librarians and school officials beside themselves trying to fathom what they were to do with these CD's.
Hat's off to Kansas for some chutzpah and balls to reject these CD's though the music industry skates on the whole deal anyway.
Most odd to me is the permission to the industry to choose what the form of payment in settlement would be. This is similar and as offensive as the wink and nod to Microsoft to "settle" many of their claims by "contributing" software to schools... at inflated MSRP valuations.
This was very similar to what libraries do all the time.
That doesn't make it right. Societies discriminated against blacks "all the time" too.
They did libraries a big favor by selecting these CDs because there's no way libraries could have said what they wanted.
If there's "no way" that libraries can say what they want, it's a flaw in the organization of the libraries of Kansas, not a license for someone else to dictate their content for them. It seems to me that, having continual contact with the public, libraries are more in touch with what the people really want. Therefore, they should be in charge of stocking themselves.
So much for 'evening things out'.
Why on earth is the music industry allowed to choose what CDs to send so they can dump whatever stock they would otherwise send to a landfill? This is not a settlement its crap. They should be settling with money or with a selection of _all_ their CDs or those at the courts will. Fuck those bitches totally. The AG was should have refused every single one and asked for more. Lets make a settlement were the defendant is allowed to empty all the fluff out of their pockets and see how that goes down.
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The fact that the RIAA is picking the cds instead of giving the recipients the choice of what to get is what's so stupid about this. They never should have been given that option.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Rejected CDs
rejected for Kansas public libraries by Attorney General Phill Kline's office:
* Alice In Chains, "Greatest Hits," "Live"
* Big Punisher, "Yeeeah Baby"
* Blink 182, "Cheshire Cat"
* Foxy Brown, "China Doll"
* Concrete Blonde, "Bloodletting," "Classic Masters"
* Cypress Hill, "III," "Live at the Fillmore"
* Da Brat, "Unrestricted"
* Devo, "Pioneers Who Got Scalped"
* Heavy D, "Heavy"
* Jagged Edge, "JE Heartbreak"
* Live, "The Distance to Here"
* Mase, "Harlem World"
* NAS, "It Was Written," "Nastradamas"
* Notorious B.I.G., "Born Again"
* OutKast, "Aquemini," "Stankonia"
* Rage Against the Machine, "Renegades"
* Lou Reed, "Growing Up in Public," "Rock and Roll Heart," "Sally Can't Dance," "Walk on the Wild Side"
* Silver Chair, "Freak Show"
* Soul Asylum, "Candy From a Stranger," "Let Your Dim Light Shine"
* Stone Temple Pilots, "Tiny Lights: Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop"
* Toadies, "Hell Below"
* "Bad Boy Records Greatest Hits"
* The Wu-Tang Clan, "The W"
* Wyclef Jean, "The Carnival"
Dumb part of this is while Kline is trying to censor what come into the libraries, he hasn't been looking at what's already there.
:(
I live in Kansas and our library's collection of audio CD's is mostly stuff nobody under 30 would be interested in. Lots of broadway musical scores, classical records that can be bought for $3-$8 in Wal-Mart because they are in Public Domain, ect.
Anyway, there's a small collection of "Pop" music, and I know there's a copy of Slipknot's Iowa in there, and there's some RATM, too. So it's already in circulation in Kansas.
Maybe the collection of discs is mostly unsellable stuff. But the lists of artists being blocked right now sounds a lot more interesting than reports of several thousand CDs of Whitney Housten singing the Star Spangled banner like other states are getting.
It's not the artists' best works, but it sounds like we got some of the better giveaways. I say let them in since we're not getting any choices.
When I first saw the headline about the discs getting rejected, I thought Kline was rejecting the settlement discs because they were tons of crap like the other states had been getting. What a letdown when I read the story.