RIAA Admits 70 Cent Price is 'In the Range'

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In its professed battle to protect the 'confidentiality' of its 70-cents-per-download wholesale price, the RIAA has now publicly filed papers in UMG v. Lindor in which it admits that the 70-cents-per-download price claimed by the defendant is 'in the range'.(pdf) From the article: 'The pricing data really may not be all that secret. Late in 2005, former New York Attorney General (and current Governor) Eliot Spitzer launched an investigation into price fixing by the record labels, alleging collusion between the major labels in their dealings with the online music industry. Gabriel believes that making the pricing information public would 'implicate [sic] very real antitrust concerns' as the labels are not supposed to share contract information with one another ... Beckerman argues in a letter to the judge that the only reason the labels want to keep this information confidential is to 'serve their strategic objectives for other cases,' which he says does not rise to the legal threshold necessary for a protective order. The proposed order would force the labels to turn over contracts with their 12 largest customers. Most details--such as the identities of the parties--would be kept confidential, but pricing information and volume would not.'"

Comments

Different types of Damages

[Harmonious Botch]

There is a difference between actual damages and statutory damages. Actual damages are an attempt to compensate the victim. Statutory damages are an attempt to include punitive damage in statute law.
Whether or not this is wise law-making is debatable. I suspect that it would be better to force the victim to sue directly for punitive damages, thus leaving the matter to a judge to determine of the punishment fits the offense.

Re:Pain And Suffering

[HappySqurriel]

The basic structure of the modern music industry was that Music Labels would promote and distribute and Artist's work in exchange for the lion's share of the physical Album's revinue while the artist would still collect the revinue from merchandise, touring and radio play; this (at the time) was a remarkably fair dead because it was expensive to promote and distribute an Artist's work in the pre-internet era.

The internet has changed everything ...

The cost to distribute music is no longer significant and a (hard-working) individual can promote themself to a reasonably successful level with very little work; you probably won't sell out stadiums, but you can make a decent living for the rest of your life as an Artist which (from all the Artists I have met) is the dream. Now, Labels exploit artists they do not help them.

The "Cost" of an Artist's work is a lifetime of developing a skillset that very few people have; it is priceless. The price of an Artist's work per song with how little it costs to distribute the song should be (roughly) the ammount of money the artist is getting.

Re:There's that free market stuff again.

[Technician]

An unregulated market quickly becomes a cartel. Only regulated markets remain free.

You have that backwards. The music distribution business is highly regulated by copyright law. That has allowed the RIAA cartel to exist. Without the regulation, Napster would have finished the cartel long ago.