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?

Comments

Paging Ray Beckerman

[eldavojohn]

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.

Starting?

[mmkkbb]

BMI and ASCAP have been thugs for a long time, threatening bar and club owners for licensing agreements for offering live music. For this reason, AS220 in Providence no longer allows musicians to perform any cover songs!

Re:Starting?

[destiny71]

Not playing covers songs isn't enough for them.

ASCAP in effect shut down a local venue because they had no way to pay the exceptionally high fees they wanted in order to allow live music to be played.

They catered to local, younger musicians playing ORIGINAL music. At first, they let them go because they were playing original music. Then, they came back and said they had to pay the fees.

Why? because someone warming up, tuning up, or whatever may play a few notes that someone else wrote.

This place was for a younger audience, so no alcohol sales. Cover charges were just to keep the place open. They had to close down.

Re:Starting?

[Bellegante]

[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.

Re:Soap box, ballot box, and jury box have failed.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm never one to stand in the way of a murderous rampage (in fact I stand as far away as possible) but I think perhaps you're overreacting just a bit. Why not just boycott them? No one is forcing you to use them or any of their "properties". Just leave them to drown in their own cultural dregs.

Re:Not all parodies are legit

[bigbigbison]

It also depends on what the parody song is about. Is it parodying the song itself, as Weird Al does, or is it using the melody of the song to create a parody of something else. I'm not a lawyer, and I've never heard of Below Average Dave before so I've no idea if this is the case (or even true) but if the song is not parodying the original song but just using the melody to parody something else, then using the song is not fair use. The Penny Arcade guys ran into this when they ran a parody of American McGee's Alice which used Strawberry Shortcake.

Re:Soap box, ballot box, and jury box have failed.

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.

Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

In a case of this nature, the guy's best bet is, in my opinion, Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts or EFF.

Re:Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts

[PopeRatzo]

Here in Chicago, we've got an outfit called Lawyers for the Creative Arts that I couldn't recommend more highly. They're really nice folks over there and great lawyers. They have helped me and lots of my friends many times.

If you're a Chicago artist or musician or writer and you need a lawyer, this is a great place to go. Just remember, when you hit it big, do something nice for LCA so they can keep helping "starving" artists. They're really easy to get to, too - just a block from the Chicago Ave. Brown Line stop.

Young artists just starting to do a little business ought to get in touch with them even if they don't think they need a lawyer at the moment. They'll not only help you make sure that you're doing things properly, in a legal sense, but they're great at putting creative people in touch with one another, which, even when it doesn't result in some synergistic result, makes you understand that you're not alone.