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Record Labels To Pay For Copyright Infringement
innocent_white_lamb writes "Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., EMI Music Canada Inc., Universal Music Canada Inc. and Warner Music Canada Co. have agreed to pay songwriters and music publishers $47.5 million in damages for copyright infringement and overdue royalties to settle a class action lawsuit. 'The 2008 class action alleges that the record companies "exploited" music owners by reproducing and selling in excess of 300,000 song titles without securing licenses from the copyright owners and/or without paying the associated royalty payments. The record companies knowingly did so and kept a so-called "pending list" of unlicensed reproductions, setting aside $50 million for the issue, if it ever arose, court filings suggest.'"
"let's try this illegal thing! Maybe we won't get caught and we can keep the 50 million. if we do, what harm?"
It's a bit more insidious than that. This 50 million wasn't just sitting in a trash bag under the CEO's desk. It was out there, making interest. So they profited from their copyright infringement. Their punishment should be worse!
I currently buy all my music legally.
This is making me reconsider, at least when buying music published by these douchebags.
which is totally what she said
You missed the obvious question: How on earth did the damages end up within 5% of what they had set aside? Using the per infringement figure, they set aside $167 and paid $158 when the statuatory damages range from $750 to $150,000? Wtf is going on here?
INAL, but this could be a GOOD thing. Now when someone gets sued by the RIAA they can point to this case and say that they should only be paying the RIAA $167 per track, as per this example. They could perhaps even argue to pay less as they had no business interest in the infringement, unlike in this instance.
Obviously, they paid 2.5M for the lawyers. If this was budgeted from the start it explains why the figure "randomly" ended up being exactly 5% of the total set aside. This means the plaintiff's lawyers simply accepted the 47.5M the labels had set aside.
And especially dead artists!
I have absolutely no respect for companies like Sony that have in their libraries huge quantities of pd music performed by great artists like Wilhelm Kempf, Karl Bohm, Lenard Bernstein, George Szell etc, etc...and on and on. Here they are not making it available to willing buyers and just sitting on it like a bunch of trolls at a bridge stopping travelers through the world of classical music.
This is why it is almost impossible for new classical artists to break through anymore. There is no way for plebs to experience great classical music as there was during the heydays of the 1960-70s when you could by classical lps just about anywhere..including low end stores like K-Mart, or Sears!
This greedy amoral cartel has absolutely no respect for the legacy of great music that is part of our heritage and deserve to be taken apart and given a financial drubbing for their behaviour!
I speak as a grieving Old_Flatulent classical musician that hopes eventually the corrupt entertainment industry system that stops great artists from blooming will eventually die.
In cases like this sometimes I wonder if it's beyond that, that the company and the class action lawyers collude to screw the class. That they purposely get themselves sued by "friendly" lawyers who settle for peanuts so they have legal immunity from everyone who didn't opt out of the class. Mass commercial copyright violation sounds more like a federal crime worthy of prison time than this.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What should have happened is, the MafiAA corps should have been forcibly disbanded, assets sold, and all singers and songwriters released from their slave-labor contracts.
The double upside there is that we could get rid of the MafiAA companies and destroy the Payola system that still strangleholds music radio today. Maybe we'd have some real radio stations that would do things like play local artists, new acts simply because they like the sound, or even spin entire albums now and again.
Of course, we should probably reinstitute the media ownership limits. In 1995 there were over 5000 independent radio station companies, by 1997 five companies controlled 95% of the radio market.