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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.
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.
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.
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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?
Is there a similar site for movies as well?
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.
Herein lies the issue. If they go with the artist numbers, then revenues might be small. Punitive and compensatory damages will likely be small as a result. However, if they want to claim higher numbers, then the artists will turn around and sue them for the stolen revenue. They're caught between a rock and a hard place, and that's good...
Early 2000 I did a bit of research on the topic and found somewhere a document [...] that showed the RIAA's claim of loss of income to be fewer records released, not because people were downloading music for free
Is this what you're referring to?
Infringement isn't about sharing a complete copy. If you shared half a song with two people, that could be interpreted (and would be, I expect) of two infringements.
Taken to an (absurd IMO) extreme, that could be taken to mean that if you shared 1/N of a song with N people, that would be N infringements ... meaning one could easily "infringe" several hundred thousand times while uploading to someone over p2p. This seems absolutely absurd to us, but until someone answers "what fraction of a copyrighted work is no longer considered infringement", that could very well BE the court interpretation as well. Currently, it seems (to a lay person like myself) that the courts consider ANY fraction of a work to be infringing.
Not being a lawyer, the only reference I have on this is the copyright.gov listing of the copyright code, which seems pretty vague.
Herein lies the issue. If they go with the artist numbers, then revenues might be small. Punitive and compensatory damages will likely be small as a result. However, if they want to claim higher numbers, then the artists will turn around and sue them for the stolen revenue. They're caught between a rock and a hard place, and that's good...
You could expand that as well. If there is a *cough* significant difference between the two numbers, the disclosure could open the RIAA companies to accusations of conspiracy to defraud on a grand scale. Passing the hot potato between holding companies until fees eat up the value that would otherwise be distributed as profit is an old trick. A very old trick, and one that wouldn't be treated sympathetically by a court that enforced visibility of the transactions as a group. The term, I think, is "forensic accounting" and firms like KPMG (disclosure: once was employee, long ago) have practice groups that are used by prosecutors for just this purpose.
I don't think it would be the first time that the discovery part of a lawsuit triggered new proceedings. Sort of like "Well, I was just on my way to a burglary when the guy ran into me..."
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
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....
Would be interesting to compare said numbers to, say, what Reznor has been making from his "download the album for $5" thing.
I know he said he got more from it that he did from most of his albums, but would be good to have hard numbers :)
...
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.