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BPI Sue AllOfMp3 In British Courts
Ckwop writes "AllOfMp3 is getting sued by the British Phonographic Industry. From the article:
"We have maintained all along that this site is illegal and that the operator of the site is breaking UK law by making sound recordings available to UK-based customers without the permission of copyright owners. Now we will have the opportunity to demonstrate in the UK courts the illegality of this site."
" The issue of course will be whether any injunction will be enforceable or not.
That's the sad part - it's not intended to be a joke. Just being honest.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
How much of the money from allofmp3.com goes to the artists that actually made the music?
If Russian Courts can't close a russian website...
...
...first you have to provide the state prosecutor with an incentive to prosecute these guys, then you have to provide the judge with an incentive to find them guilty, then you have to provide the cops with an incentive to shut them down, then
Isn't justice wonderful in countres with a low TI corruption rating?
Are they really selling perminant liscenses?
I thought that Russian law included wire as a type of broadcast (like cable), and the loophole is that internet is being included this way too. So sending be an mp3 is like me tuning the raidio to your station.
AllOfMP3 is essentially an internet raidio station. They are not selling liscenses, and it is just a side effect of their broadcast methd that you get a perminant copy.
Just my understanding, probably not true.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Actually you are wrong on all but the first point. Both iTunes and Napster do pay. People actually get cheques. A friend of mine finally got his albums approved on iTunes and started getting his first royalty cheques a few months later.
I came to shop and cashed out €18 for old Queen's album The Works. How much of that went to artists?
€5-7 is retailer's fee. about €10 is label fee. So how much went to artist? I wonder.
[ You really seem to work for RIAA/whatever. You speak too well. Or if not, talk to them - probably they are hiring now for astroturf campaing. You would fit. ]
The point here is that people want art on their conditions, not on conditions of labels. It's simple as that. And at moment there are no other ways to easily buy music. Read any review on how subscription model works in real life and what kind of PITA it can be. (At least for some people Apple's iTMS kind'a works - better than nothing).
Just try to get that in your head: it's not about money, it's about music. It's not about industry - it's about art and music. Ring any bells?
I think the all story with "recorded music" is just bluff. Now how do I understand the russian copyright law. The law is quite simple. The performace is what artist is paid for. I can record the performance and (granted that I have paid artist the fee for performance) I would own the recording I did (with copyrights etc). It's my recording of her/his performance. I can make money selling the recording. Artists can go on doing money by performing. It's easy as that. Nobody is robbed, as RIAA/BPI/IFPI/friends try to tell everybody. Artist has to pay taxes from the profits s/he makes performing. If I would be distributing recording, I would need a license for that from gov't and of course I will pay taxes too. (*)
As much as idealistically it sounds, I think such model can work: only way for artists to profit is to perform. Not like the starlets a la Britney Spears, living off huge promotional and ad campaigns. They have to perform. No performance - no money. I think it's even logical.
In the end, as live music fan, I can tell that in reality that how it is works. Recorded music is in quantity - but it will never beat the quality of live performance. All best music I ever heard in my life was in Dresdner "Blue Note" cafe sitting against musicians play live jazz.
(*) I hope I did not infriged your copyrights for quoting *your* words in *my* comment? Or would you sue me for that??
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I once did a rough calculation on the true marginal cost of distributing music online. It was something like 0.3 cents a tune -- and this was with a woefully inefficient, viz. my laptop. About a third of the cost was power, and half the power cost is my laptop display, which would be unnecessary with a similar but headless setup.
So at 10 cents a track, the gross profit margin would be 'round 95 percent.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
it would only stop the least technically inclined users, unless the BPI is going to set up a China-grade firewall around *.uk.
Hey, I don't get much from my recordings, period. We don't sell that many. We do own the recordings, though, which is quite common with indie labels. But still, we so far haven't made much from iTunes... ...But that $35 check beats the hell out of a russian selling my stuff and not giving me anything.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
AllofMp3 is not the consumer's friend.
There was a period when most of our albums were on allofmp3.
So you might think I'm just bitter. Well, it goes beyond that.
They had two EPs of ours available for sale. Interestingly enough, we actually *give* those EPs away free on the internet - internet promotion, viral advertising, all that crap. These EPs were also mp3-only - high quality digital masters do not exist outside my studio.
So how, exactly, does a consumer paying a premium to download a wav file that was merely upsampled from a free mp3 benefit them?
Seems like kind of a ripoff to me.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
Or get orders that would allow them to seize any money that is owed to AllOfMp3.com from third parties (E.g. credit card providers) rather than sending it to the original destination.
Thank you. Thank you for taking the time and effort to make your arguments in a well-written, eloquent post. Thank you for not jumping on the Internet-wide "Fuck the RIAA/MPAA/whatever" bandwagon. Thank you for being one of the increasingly rare few that can cope with the fact that "digital" does not equal "no payment required." Thank you.
"No, the RIAA members should put up their own site(s) using the same model as allofmp3.com to sell their music. "
I wish they would! Even at 10 times the price of allofmp3, I would buy. I would much prefer to buy knowing my fair shae is going to the artists who make the music. But they aren't selling - they don't want my business. They stopped me buing CDs by putting DRM on them so they won't play in my car or on my PC. They no longer sell music that I can listen to. allofmp3 is currently my only choice - it's that or nothing. And allofmp3 even provides ogg files!
I'm sure I'm not the only one who would buy music again if it were available.
Yes, as a musician I want to get paid for my work. However, I don't believe that any major label is going to provide me with that.
Even in a situation where the artist's royalties havent paid back their advance and not made a dime, they still got flown around the world, went to wild parties and got fed and put up in great hotels at the record companies expense. I dont see this russian website donating money towards recording studio fees, do you?
Where the hell is this relevant? The artists chose those things, paid for it out of their advance, and will have to repay it. I can record an album for a lot less, and have it sound just as good, if not a lot better.
The Allofmp3 site was sold all the RIAA music they have for bargain-basement prices by the RIAA. If musicians want to 'make it', they need to get involved in the new recording industry and take control of things themselves. I refuse to 'owe' multiple albums to anyone.
A lot of ISPs here make great noises about how they do *not* filter traffic (and many of them are uncapped also).
There's simply no framework to require them to filter it - they don't filter anything else, why this?
A friend who used to work at an ISP says the reason UK ISPs are so against filtering is it would jepoardise their common carrier status - at the moment they're not legally liable if someone accesses kiddie porn over their connection.. once they have filtering in place it one judgement to remove their immunity and force them to filter *everything* that could get them into trouble.
It's hard to make money on the web, it's a very crowded place. Some musicians try to cut out the middle men by licensing legitimate copies of their own material, see Cerebral Sounds for instance, but they're swamped by sites such as allofmp3 who simply pocket the cash.
"cliffski" wrote:
you go to a website, download the music yourself and choose to listen to it. Then you insist you shouldnt have to pay for it.
What if I rewrite it like so:
1. you go to a forest, take a photo of a tree yourself and choose to look at it later. Then you insist you shouldnt have to pay for it.
2. you go to a public parc, walk towards a statue yourself and choose to look at it. Then you insist you shouldnt have to pay for it.
3. you go to a website, download the index.html file yourself and choose to read it. Then you insist you shouldnt have to pay for it.
4. you go to a website, download the music yourself and choose to listen to it. Then you insist you shouldnt have to pay for it.
In all cases, someone had to do work (rangers, sculptor, website author, musician). Yet am I really supposed to pay each time I merely encounter the fruits of someone's labor? Isn't it simpler to just pay people for the time it took them to produce the given thing, and leave it at that. If the pay is too low, they can simply refuse to produce the work.
"Most full albums are selling for less than $2. And it's the content owners that get to set prices, not a web site."
Okay.. let's LET the artists set their own royalty rate -- note that I said the actual artists, not the mythical "content owners" (which usually means the distributor, ie. RIAA cartel members).
Just as a starting point, let's set the download royalty at what the artists are SUPPOSED to be paid by their RIAA masters, rather than what they are ACTUALLY paid after all "costs" are deducted (see http://www.negativland.com/albini.html). And let's pay the royalty directly to the artist, not to any distribution scheme or middleman.
The artists are now ahead of the game, the downloaded music costs a mere few cents more per track, and the RIAA is rendered superfluous**.
Back to letting the artist set their own royalties -- fair enough, now that the RIAA is out of the picture, let's do that. Artists who get greedy will price themselves out of the market (or back into MP3 piracy), making gouging unprofitable. But artists who set their royalties sanely will have another income stream that they didn't have before, with no effort or expense on their part.
** Noting that THIS is exactly what the RIAA fears the most. Piracy has nothing to do with it.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?