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RIAA Loses Bid To Keep Revenues Secret
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's motion to keep secret the record companies' 1999-to-date revenues for the copyrighted song files at the heart of the case has been denied, in the Boston case scheduled for trial July 27th, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum. The Judge had previously ordered the plaintiff record companies to produce a summary of the 1999-to-date revenues for the recordings, broken down into physical and digital sales. On the day the summary was due to be produced, instead of producing it, they produced a 'protective order motion' asking the Judge to rule that the information would have to be kept secret. The Judge rejected that motion: 'the Court does not comprehend how disclosure would impair the Plaintiffs' competitive business prospects when three of the four biggest record labels in the world — Warner Bros. Records, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and UMG Recording, Inc. — are participating jointly in this lawsuit and, presumably, would have joint access to this information.'"
Spill the beans already, how much are we talking?
Anyone down for taking bets?
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
I will believe it when the smoke and mirrors are actually changed to some hard data. This seems more an Emperor's new clothes thing to me though. The RIAA does not wish to reveal that the hand they are playing is a busted flush
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
I wonder if they told the artists one set of numbers and need more time to make sure what they give to the court matches that set.
Panic now, beat the rush!
because music copyright usually results in a monopoly situation there is not competition - no one else is publishing the same track in competition to them, so the information is not commercially sensitive
Reede: Your honor, I object!
Judge: Why?
Reede: Because it's devastating to my case!
Judge: Overruled.
Reede: Good call!
They'd have to show what they actually gain from "honest" business and have that compared to their extortion schemes. It could even show that the "claimed losses" exceed what one person could possibly cause in damages.
And that in turn could mean that their insane claims (and the verdicts that ensued) could be up for review, they could end up with far more sane sentences and that in turn would make the whole "shock and awe" deterrent a joke.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
haha! well, maybe now their hollywood accounting will come back to bite them in the ass as they struggle to show that the songs are now worth massive damages, when they were worth nothing or less as they computed royalties for the artists they were screwing.
The decline in physical sales correlates perfectly to the increase in digital sales? So they'll have a hard time whining about pirates because they're still making a ton of money, but still want to play the victim.
Sony, EMI, Warner Bros, and Universal are in real trouble. Make sure you check http://riaaradar.com/ to make sure when you purchase music you don't buy anything from these companies that fund the RIAA.
Now the artists will find out exactly how much the record companies are skimming off of them and force the record companies to pay up!
Why bother
The only issue could be that they are not consistent with regards to their demands.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
MAFIAA: But sir we sold 4 million digital downloads and made 2 million in revenue from those downloads.
JUDGE: So your are saying you made about 50 cents each download right?
MAFIAA: Yes sir.
JUDGE: So we can roughly say the value of each download is 50 cents right?
MAFIAA: Yes sir.
JUDGE: So even if we get "Biblical" in damages of 40 fold we are looking at about $20 a track right?
MAFIAA: Errr well....
JUDGE: So for 24 tracks at $20 bucks each Jammie owes you about $480 bucks right?
MAFIAA: You have to take into account everyone that downloaded them.
JUDGE: Ok so lets say 10 people downloaded each one, that's about so that's about $4800 right?
MAFIAA: Sir that isn't enough!
JUDGE: How much is enough?
MAFIAA: IT'S NEVER ENOUGH!!! (Rips off the mask to reveal he's infact a tenticle demon!!)
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
How much time and money (much of it coming out of our taxes) could be saved if the law could somehow be made clear enough that it would be obvious which of these sort of motions would succeed, and which wouldn't?
Or if things like company sales and profits were a truly matter of public record in the first place and so massaging would be obvious long before a case ever got to court?
Ray--if I was ordered by a judge to produce a detailed breakdown of my accounting (say a trial for tax evasion) practices over the past years by 7/31, and on the 31st I came to court with just a "protective order motion" asking that my accounting practices be kept secret...
Wouldn't I be held in contempt?
I mean...I can see producing the motion *with* the information...or...before it...but... tell me why it is these guys appear to have rights in the legal system that everyone else doesn't... More importantly, what piece of paperwork do I have to file so I can ignore court orders like they do and get off scott free?
Gertner's ruling states that "[the Court] will, however, order the second set of documents, which implicate the business interests of third-party artist-owned companies, shielded from disclosure."
What are these documents, and who are these "third-party artist-owned companies?"
the judge has corrected a MAJOR malfunction in your logic circuits. next time when you accuse someone of damaging your profits, you will remember to actually prove EVIDENCE to back up your case. that is, unless your leashholders are afraid of being proven wrong about all the shit you have been perpetrating. enjoy.
Read radical news here
This could be the beginnings of an interesting new strategy against the RIAA. Forcing the RIAA to produce the verifiable truth about various things and to pull their skeletons from their closets and put them on display can likely act as quite a deterrent against RIAA actions.
Still. How is the judge taking their failure to produce the data? Does making a motion instead of producing the data result in an automatic extension somehow? Is this an unwritten part of due process now?
Maybe I'm wrong about the judicial system...apparently there's a lone judge out there who isn't an idiot or a stooge!
Who knew?
Haha, motherfuckers the mashed potatoes and turkey drummies really fell off their gravy boat.
Wooo, lunch time, baby!
Early 2000 I did a bit of research on the topic and found somewhere a document, converted to a jpg, that showed the RIAA's claim of loss of income to be fewer records released, not because people were downloading music for free. I lost the doc in some data transfers from hard drive to hard drive as equipment was upgraded, but the facts were that each year they released more records and their profits increased each year, when 1999 came around they however released fewer records, thus having decreased profit. But they claimed that people using p2p caused their loss, total bullshit.
Mumble mumble mum....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Gump#Author_controversy
...when you publicly state that you want the 3.5% that the artists get, to get down to 2.8%, while still expecting them to pay the studio from that.
Because that is exactly what they tried to do.
Those that they told another set of numbers are us. To justify the "piracy" inquisition. (Occam's razor!)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Today, if you are one of the folks "in the know" about downloading music, you can grab whatever you want for free. There isn't anything that is going to stop this, really. I believe there is a dividing line between the folks that went to school during a time when such sharing (even floppy trading) was going on and older people. The older people as a general rule do not know about downloading and aren't getting their music for free.
As this demographic changes, fewer and fewer people are going to be paying for music. It is a fact that disturbs the music companies to no end, because their time is limited. In China they have already faced up to this and sales of music is nonexistent. No matter what, the time remaining for there to be a revenue stream associated with recorded music is limited.
As far as copyright is concerned, who cares how much money the record companies are receiving? Even if all the downloading that is going on didn't change their revenue in the slightest, this is still irrelevent to copyright protection and the penalties associated with it. A jury might find, with a symathetic defendent that the statutory penalties are too stiff when compared with the volume of sharing (copyright violation) that is going on in the world today. But still, I don't see this having anything to do with record company revenue. Unless you want to make the argument that the record companies are receiving an adequate amount of compensation and further compensation is undeserved.
It's not just the royalties/payments to the artists, it's the taxes, which could become an even bigger issue.
While big corps might be able to get away with shady practises to hide their real profits, if they try to stick with a large penalty by announcing revenues of several times what was declared on their taxes they're likely going to be in deep trouble
Not only that, but showing huge profits is going to blow away their pleas of "piracy is killing the industry and we're losing money/profits/etc", which is probably the real point here....
...I'm glad Bush is gone!
~Just as a thing fails if it lacks a kernel, so too it fails if it lacks a skin. ~ Rumi, Discourses
This probably has to do with statutory vs actual damages. This is a provision in current copyright law. Often times damages are awarded not on statutory damages, but actual damages. Viewing the income statement for this artist will help put this into perspective.
Libertas in infinitum
More to the point, if the produce a number that is less than the value of the settlement that they are requesting, it might make it difficult to justify the damages that they are claiming.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
"Digital" and "Physical" are not antonyms.
Or, for the vocabulary-challenged, "Digital" does NOT mean the opposite of "Physical".
Music CD's are *digital* - music cassettes and vinyl phonograph records were (are) analog.
"Digital" and "Analog" are antonyms. "Physical" and "Virtual" are antonyms.
But the term "Digital" is not a correct term to distinguish
"distributing a digital representation of analog information (eg, music) by allowing it to be transferred to many individuals via a telecommunications network, and then stored on a medium supplied by each individual",
from
"distributing a digital representation of analog information (.. music) by storing duplicate copies of it on many physical media, and then physically distributing the individual physical mediums to many individuals"
When they end up having to produce their profits, we'll be able to see the proportion of money they make from lawsuits on consumers versus actual sales. Also, maybe the IRS can see where they've falsified their tax reporting. In addition, we'll be able to see how little they've actually paid their artists, and how they've given none of their revenues from lawsuits to the artists.
/weebit claps!
/weebit proceeds to do the happy dance!
Most record companies have millions in unclaimed and unpaid royalties. One thing all their systems have in common, they were built around "record" sales and not single song sales. Each single song on itunes probably corresponds to a whole "album" in their systems. So with that in mind, I doubt they could even produce the data requested by the judge.
Sounds like a trump card to me...Lawyer for the defendant " I would like a detailed breakdown of the royalties generated by the songs....etc..etc." RIAA lawyer " AWWWWW F*CK I'M DEAD...withdrawing lawsuit."
Awesome, now they have to prove where they come up with a supposed 12 million $ lawsuit against a grandmother for downloading songs etc...this will definitely set a precedent and send a clear message to them for future trials!
It doesn't matter that the average is 1.0 copies sent per person. If one person sent 1,000,000 copies and 1,000,000 people received one copy each (e.g. through an HTTP server), that one person is still liable for the 1,000,000 copies sent.