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Suing Your Customers a Good Idea?
VB writes "Boycott-RIAA is running Fred von Lohmann's article which looks like the ideal answer to solving the P2P problem. He suggests setting up a payment system similar to SESAC, ASCAP, and BMI, collecting organizations for songwriters. This seems such an obvious solution and a great way to get artists paid and give listeners the right to listen to their favorite songs cheaply and keep them out of jail. Why wouldn't this work?"
Why wouldn't this work?
Because this system doesn't give the RIAA their share.
It's an email list with people talking about the digital delivery of art and the convergence of entertainment and technology.
Bunch of people there talking about this subject every day (and have been for years).
Not according to Reuters they're not. Music revenues are up but not CD sales.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Europe and the US have the same kinds of taxes. Europe also has it on equipment.
And the people who get that money are the people who already make money; small artists are effectively left out in the cold.
About a week ago Lawrence Lessig mentioned a new book called Promises to Keep . The book, written by Prof. William Fisher, chronicles a bit of entertainment industry history and the various "alternatives we face for protecting copyright in a digital age" (to use Lessig's phrase).
Chapter Six is freely available (66-page PDF), and in that chapter an alternative compensation system proposed by Fisher (not entirely unlike Von Lohmann's from the main article) is outlined in excruciating detail. This detail includes specific cost and savings estimates.
What makes Fisher's proposal interesting is that he also includes a mechanism to allow derivative works to be created, and for both deriving and derived authors to be compensated.
- Neil Wehneman
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
"Suing Your Customers a Good Idea?"
That's just it. They are suing those who AREN'T their customers. Customers implies buying. If you are downloading (I do it all the time, won't deny it), you aren't buying.
What is hard to understand about that? The RIAA isn't hurting any of their potential customers by this.
If I shoot the kid who stole a candy bar in my store, did I just kill a customer (and lose profit) ? Certainly not!
The Independent Council of Music Listeners in North America (ICMNA) deemed that over 97% of those who download will not end up making a purchase of THAT PARTICULAR recording. That isn't to say they won't buy other brands. But who is to say thats even the same label?
I've been in bands on several labels not dealing with the RIAA and have been treated fair. I've also been with other labels and have been ripped off.
For instance, right now the Star Trek band I'm in, is on a compilation for Trekkies 2. That label's payment seems to be 6 CDs marked "FOR PROMO USE ONLY". Not a surprise for us -- we expected it -- but some of the other bands on that comp have been bitching.
Not only do the bands not get paid, but they were told to buy copies of the CD from amazon because the label WON'T sell copies to bands. That's a nice step of sleaziness that I haven't heard of before. Ensuring that the bands can't even get beer money selling CDs at shows, and trying to get them to boost the amazon rating for a CD that 99.99999999999 of the population wouldn't listen to even if it was free.
Sheesh.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI (of which I am an affiliate) don't pay most of their artists. Their collection scheme is somewhat misleading. For the most part, they only pay artists that gross over a certain amount, that make a certain amount of money on tour, sell a certain number of records, and have a significant amount of airplay. So basically only Britney Spears gets paid, and the millions of artists that are touring and sell a small number of records through distribution often never see the money. I know I never have.
The Performers Rights Organizations (PRO's) are in bed with the RIAA and the record labels. If anyone is ripping the artists off, it's the labels and the PRO's, not the filetraders. I refer you to a brilliant article at http://www.negativland.com/albini.html written by Steve Albini, producer of Nirvana's "In Utero" and mastermind behind the band Big Black.
That's the great thing about the internet. All I need to make music are some instruments, a way to hook up the audio out to my computer, and a piece of software to record and edit that sound. I could then distribute that to the entire world. This is the key point that gets missed in these little flamewars. Piracy and the trampling of our rights are side effects of an underlying issue (and while it is important and neccesary to fight for them, property rights are sacred and unassailable territory in America, never mind that these morons around us have never fucking read anything about any philosophy that might suggest reasonable limitations on these rights).
The real reason they're scared is because the internet makes them obsolete. The only problem is that they won't become so until everyone ignores them. Listen to techno (good techno, big difference) with labels like WARP and other indy music with reasonable digital music policies. Movies? I'd hope that you'd be smart enough for that trash to bore you. Books and the Internet are quickly becoming the last sanctuaries of complex human thought and art (along with interconnected ideas, themes and subtlety, all abandoned in the world outside of the University and Internet. Proof? Read the paper or watch the TV.). Remember, the $$AAs only exist as long as they can persuade others that they still have a purpose - to distribute and record cultural content. And they do it 20 times less efficiently than the Internet.
Sure, stupid people with poor taste will keep giving them money, but for the first time in history, the Internet has given us options. We can make our own culture. But most people can't hope to understand the profound implications this raises for institution and tradition. Any of the pioneers of human thought would be amazed at the possibilities that a truly peer-to-peer system such as the Internet makes possible. By creating and sharing our culture through it, we've made obsolete the old institutions and abolished the physical limitations imposed on us by analog distribution (watch as they clamor for a piece of the new pie). It's a testament to human adaptation that we treat it as routine.
I've had run ins mostly with sesac for the last year. I stream video of folks singing karaoke from a bar called 7 Bamboo here in San Jose California.
/end stupid licensing rant
I have several problems with giving some body blanket rights to collecting royaltees.
1. They can use whatever broad definition of what requires a license.
Once you give an organization the right to collect royaltees, there is no checks or balances in place to define what entitles them to a royaltee. Remember elevator music? Thanks to the licensing boards going after elevator operators, we no longer hear it. How in the world is elevator music making someone money? It's not, it's stupid.
2. Licensing board broad collection schemes.
I read over the sesac contract very carefully. Basically, I pay based on the number of hits my website gets in a month. What does hits have to do with the number of viewers on the video stream? Nothing, the two are completely unrelated. I could see paying based on my stream traffic, but not on the number of hits I get on the site. If they wanted to make me pay based on my ttsl reports Unfortunately me and the license boards don't see eye to eye on this one.
3. Just plain old greed.
The bar I work for already pays ascap/bmi/sesac public performance fees. They pay a total of $1500@year. Isn't that enough? Why do they want more for the stream? It's just stupid.
4. Lack of disclosure from the licensing boards.
I think licensing boards should be *required* to tell folks exactly what would make them exempt from licensing fees. Unfortunatly this is not the case, they are more interested in getting you to sign a contract (which basically gives up all your rights) instead of telling you what does and does not count as copyright.
I found several sections of the US copyright law that gives me exemptions in the case with karaoke streaming on the net. There's several sections 110-117 which deal all with copyright exemptions. Parody, it's not the real singer or the real background music and it's free to watch. Also there is cultural exemption (We're a Japanese owned karaoke bar, karaoke is from japan) Despite me pointing these out to sesac on several occasions, they're still very insistant that I pay royaltees for the stream.
Anyways, licensing boards need to operate more like a goverment agency than a glass tower of lawyers (which is exactly what they are now) Their only interest is money, and there is no limit to where they will go to collect it. They will lie, use scare tactics, and do everything short of sending hired goons to collect it.
On top of that, lawyers are not techies. Letting a group of lawyers define the law on anything technical is a *bad* thing.
Ok, end rant. Watch my karaoke station.
I can't say I was surprised by the reply I got back. It hit on every recording industry talking point you can name -- "file-sharing hurting the artists", "fairly compensate recording artists", etc, and didn't even touch the points I had raised. I just chucked it at that point.
Fortunately the board did see some sanity and denied a bunch of the levies the recording industry wanted (like the 0.8cents per MB of flash memory) -- this time, anyway.
From Ars Technica: ...the numbers that the RIAA uses to talk about "sales" are actually just numbers relating to shipments. The gist of it is pretty simple: the RIAA has their own tracking system based on units shipped, while Nielsen Ratings bases their Soundscan tracking system on actual barcode-scanned purchases. The problem is that Soundscan shows a 10% increase in music sales when comparing the first quarter of 2004 to 1Q 2003.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Here is a short list. Some are in America, others are global. Remember the blank audio tape tax passed in the 80's? It's still in effect as well as a more modern blank CD and CD/DVD burner tax.
_ moreschools/ 0 120018251.htm
http://www.boycott-riaa.com/facts/
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-891781.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/28/riaa_sues
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/gee2003
And here is some info on blank CD taxes in the US and around the world.
Please note that not all of these "taxes" are government taxes in the traditional sense. There are a couple of important questions you should ask yourself though. If every blank CD and new CD/DVD recorder has a tax that is paid to the RIAA (not the artists) as compensation for copyrigt violations, does that mean that we are now free to pirate music since the fine has been paid in advance? Do you believe in corporate welfare? Also, should the public allow tax money to be used to fund governmental investigations into civil matters, such as copyright violations, if said findings are only used to support the corporation (favoring a corporate entity over individual citizen)? Please keep in mind, unless it is bootleging on a massive scale and/or the fradulent copies are sold for profit, it is a civil matter.
Don't forget, we have allowed our rights to me limited more and more over the last couple decades. The media taxes, DMCA, copyright extensions, and many others have made the corporate job of enforcement easier at the expense of personal liberties. The DMCA in paticular only added a few new corporate rights, but was intended to make enforcement/prevention easier at the expense of, lets say, fair use or personal privacy. Not only have we given these corporations laws to make their lives easier, they have the nerve to turn around and say they need tax money because they don't have enough of their own to spend in their defense. It's the equavilent of erasing the fifth ammendment, handing over incriminating evidence, and funding the prosecution.
Do you know that as a songwriter you can get sued for posting your own lyrics to the web? Or that you can owe someone money for performing your own works?
The First Amendment and copyright are inextricably linked, since copyright is an overt Constitutional restriction of First Amenedment rights. That's what it's there for.
If the labels are actually interested in protecting the First Amendment rights of artists to free expression in their lyrics, why do they force artists to create bowdlerized versions of their songs to be sold (unlabeled as bowdlerized versions) in Wal-Mart? Or, if the artist refuses to cooperate, simply have an engineer punch in bowdlerization against the artist's wishes?
The anwer is because they don't give a fuck about the artist's First Amendment rights. They care about their own ability to sell things without getting sued or otherwise restricted by law. The label owns the recording and is liable, not the artist.
As a street performer of 20 years I'm well aware of what the First Amendment covers, my very freedom is occasionally dependent upon such knowledge, but as a songwriter and recording artist I'm also aware of how copyright issues effect those First Amendment rights and when you make a recording for Sony you assign those rights, by contract and by law, to Sony.
And the RIAA represents Sony, not the artist, and the marketers, lobbiests and lawyers who work for the RIAA know exactly who their client is.
There's a word for artists who believe in and rely on the RIAA to represent their interests:
Fucked.
KFG