Slashdot Mirror
ASCAP Starts To Act Like the RIAA
Scott Lockwood writes "Below Average Dave, a Dr. Demento style parody artist, has been shut down by the ASCAP. This collective, acting as badly as the RIAA, is now attempting to ignore the 2 Live Crew Supreme Court decision that parodies are new derivative works. Just like the RIAA, ASCAP seems intent on misrepresents the law. If you know anyone who can help BA Dave in his plight, please contact him." This artist doesn't have the resources to fight the ASCAP, even though the law is pretty clearly on his side. Anyone at the EFF or the ACLU interested?
If you know anyone who can help BA Dave in his plight, please contact him.
Number of certified lawyers that read Slashdot: 5.
Number who actually give a shit: 1.
Paging Ray Beckerman alias NewYorkCountryLawyer.
My work here is dung.
Bankrupt you with costly legal fees. Which is why these conglomerates go after people who don't have the financial ability to defend themselves.
They can file a lawsuit. Do you have any idea how expensive those are, even if you settle before any substantial court apperances? Lawyers don't stop charging just because you're in the right.
What the Supreme Court said was that if a parody was sufficiently transformative, this would operate in its favour when weighing up the fair use factors. BA Dave is taking the position that because he created a parody, fair use applies, but the Supreme Court stamped on that theory pretty sharply:
"Like a book review quoting the copyrighted material criticized, parody may or may not be fair use, and petitioner's suggestion that any parodic use is presumptively fair has no more justification in law or fact than the equally hopeful claim that any use for news reporting should be presumed fair."
Now I've no idea how transformative BA Dave's parodies are, but this quote should at least show him that he needs to do a little more than cry "parody" if he's going to convince them to back off. Let's hope he can. And let's be grateful he is in the US where parody is given some recognition as a fair use. In the UK, for instance, it's viewed as being no more legitimate than any other form of copying.
What a totally unbiased article summary. It doesn't automatically take a position or make assumptions about anything. I expect a fully qualified, objective discussion to follow presenting both sides in a fair and factually-based light.
They grew that way because its so durned easy to hum a tune, write it down, and then expect to make a lifetime income off of that melody you came up with when you were on the crapper. Once people became hooked on a lifetime of income for a few days work, it became expected and their representative groups took up the fight against all threats, legal or otherwise. Seeing as the end consumer doesn't care about where the music comes from, its up to the RIAA and ASCAP and company to make the consumers care.
What was the quote? Evil is what happens when good people do nothing? Well nobody did anything, so evil happened.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
Why is it that the music industry seems to be so corrupt?
I think that's why it seems worse. Because, to some degree, it is.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Very well put.
I think the zeitgeist on Slashdot is this: we dislike record labels, but we like artists. We want artists to make money directly -- and that's why actions like pirating the music and then "going to a concert" or "buying a t-shirt" are acceptable, as more money goes to the artist.
In short, we like it when artists make money directly, without record labels being involved.
And that's exactly what ASCAP is -- a collective of songwriters and lyricists, creating a revenue stream that's largely untouched by the record labels. It provides artists a way to do what they love and get money for it, even if they're not signed to a label or selling CDs.
We want them to have rights. We simply don't want them to get all uppity and enforce those rights. You artists can have all the rights you want, but if claiming your rights gets in the way of us doing something with your music without paying you -- such as recording a new song using your melody -- then the proper response is to sit down, shut up, and know your place.
It's quite sad, really.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Then, what should I do if I'm an aspiring musician, and I'd like to draw on some of my cultural heritage -- and yes, copyright lasts so insanely long that we are talking about cultural heritage here -- and these thugs come and sue me?
In other words: What do we do about The Grey Album?
For that matter, as part of my "boycott", should I stop singing Happy Birthday?
Fuck no. I will not spend my life avoiding our culture because it happens to be owned by a few corporations. I will continue to assert that this is our culture, not theirs.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
[quote]When you play a songwriter's composition in a way that makes you money (such as attracting customers), you owe that songwriter a cut. [/quote]
Why? No, seriously, why? It doesn't take money from the people who made the music, it doesn't even deny them CD sales in the way that piracy could theoretically do (though there is no hard evidence that it does).
The reason the stupid copyright law exists in the first place is to benefit the people! It isn't so that you can claim profit from each and every rendition of a song throughout space and time. A cover band playing a professional song will never detract from the professional group's funds, and I defy you to find anything to the contrary.
Explain the moral obligation society has to pay an artist for every single performance of work that he originated, please.
Songwriters don't necessarily have CD sales. Songwriters often produce rough demos, or written music, to get their ideas to performing or recording musicians. Not all songwriters are singers.
It's the songwriters, not the original performers, who get these royalties. If I play "Love Potion Number 9" at a paid gig, Leiber and Stoller get the nickel, not The Clovers.
Exactly! And having creators get paid is of benefit to the people, it helps "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." But restricting sharing of creative works is not.
So how can we have creators get paid, and not restrict sharing?
One solution is to restrict selling, by requiring a royalty on commercial use of a work. This is orders of less magnitude less invasive than trying to restrict personal sharing. And it's more in line with intuitive notions of fairness.
(Note that I'm speaking of the general idea, not the current ASCAP/BMI implementation which adds many problematic aspects on top of it.)
And, since I said the royalties should apply only to commercial performances (as is currently the case) and only for a limited time (as it not), we don't have a disagreement on that point.
Me camping out on your front lawn will never detract from your funds. (I'm a good camper and always leave the site better than I found it.) But yet it still detracts from something abstract, from your sense of control over your life.
So it is with art. If someone gets rich off by performing a song I wrote and I get nothing, it detracts from our sense of justice and fairness.
Of course, the world is not very fair. Nor does it give us much control over our own lives. But we structure our legal and social systems around these ideas anyway.
As a practical matter, creators of works we enjoy ought to get paid. As a matter of cultural freedom, people ought to be free to share works they enjoy. As a matter of intuitive fairness, creators ought to get a share of riches made off of their creations. Royalty-right supports all these ends.
If you have a counter-proposal that does it better, I'm open to hearing it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
i think your viewpoint is quite sad.
'we' want artists, authors and others to have a copyright. but those 'we' want this copyright to be reasonable.
that includes reasonable terms on time and reuse restrictions.
really, macaulay probably wasn't the first, but he put it the best, as far as we know. on copyright extension... in 1841.
At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.
Rich