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Universal Music Demands Insurer Pay For Infringement Damages
An anonymous reader writes with a new twist in the recently resolved Canadian music label infringement lawsuit. From the article: "Earlier this year, the four primary members of the Canadian Recording
Industry Association (now Music Canada) — Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG
Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada — settled
the largest copyright
class action lawsuit
in Canadian history by agreeing to pay over $50 million to compensate
for hundreds of thousands of infringing uses of sound recordings. While
the record labels did not admit liability, the massive settlement spoke
for itself. While the Canadian case has now settled, Universal Music
has filed
its
own lawsuit, this time against its insurer, who it expects to pay
the
costs of the settlement."
...that the law to disconnect copyright infringers from the internet would have gone through.
God damn if they actually get away with this. It's already ridiculous how corporations can do all kinds of crap and only gets a slap on the wrist, but imagine if you went around infringing so many sound recordings that you'd net a $50 million fine, would your insurer be willing to pay that? I sure hope that they don't get away with this, would be fun watching the squirming with the bill.
Universal's insurer agreed to indemnify against copyright cases, and this was a copyright case. I suppose Universal should perhaps have checked that they would have been covered before agreeing to settle the case, but other than that the only out clause I can see for the insurer is that they didn't technically "lose" the case - they agreed to a settlement without admission of guilt.
Still, it boils down to media company vs. insurance company vs. lawyers, and I think it's pretty obvious the only winner out of that triumvirate is going to be lawyers. Oh well, I guess two out of three will just have to do.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
$50 million to compensate for hundreds of thousands of infringing uses of sound recordings.
$50 million is only like 2 or 3 pirated mp3's here in the states.
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The first link (2011 Jan. 11) says it was $47.5 million and that they had set aside $50 million to resolve it in case it ever went to court. (Perhaps that was not reserve funds as we were led to believe but instead the size of the insurance policy?)
The second link (2011 May 31) rounds that up to a $50 million settlement. (Meh, what's another $2.50 million?)
How did it get to be "over $50 million"? Contempt citing/accrued interest/late fees for taking so long to pay out, or just bad reporting not clarifying whether it was in Canadian dollars or the reporter had converted it to US dollars?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
My car insurance has a lot of provisions like "... void if vehicle is driven under the influence ...", "... void if vehicle is used in criminal activities ..." (i.e. smashing while being chased by the police gives no relief).
I would assume most insurances have exclusions if a crime has been involved. Copyright violation is theft, right?
There were 300,000 infringing works and the statutory damages were 20,000. That's 6 billion bucks.
50 million is chump change. The music industry is willing to take people's retirement savings, ruining their lives, but they get only a slap on the wrist.
I always have heard that CEO's and other directors gets higher pay because they do job of many
Nope, they get higher pay because their actions make more of a difference to the overall profitability of a company. Look at what Carly Fiorina did to HP or Steve Jobs did to Apple to see how much of a difference a CEO can make in either direction. The difference between a good engineer and a bad engineer is a lot less to a typical company's bottom line. The problem is that Carly got paid over $20m for almost destroying the company, so the incentives are completely wrong. Do a bad job and you make a lot of money, do a good job and you make a crazy amount of money.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Note also, that the CEO good ol' boys club, which prefers a bad CEO to a new one, still hasn't let Carly take the reins of anything important since HP....
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It seems to me some interpretation of the Hammer Clause probably applies here. Basically, if an Insured makes a settlement without the consent of the Insurer, then the Insurer is only on the hook for the amount that THEY WOULD HAVE AGREED TO SETTLE FOR. This is usually used to discourage a company from fighting a case on principle and losing more than they would have by settling. In this case, it would seem that the CRIA members might have paid LESS if they had gone to trial -- but in any event, if the Insurer did not authorize the settlement, then they aren't going to pony up for it above and beyond what they would willingly have settled for, nor will they pay for legal fees beyond the point at which they would have settled. The law probably is different in Canada, as I know it varies in other significant aspects from U.S. law. (For example, the law says policies sold to the public must be written in plain English/French and not legalese -- or at least the legalese has to be explained in plain language, and in the case of a conflict, the plain language prevails.)
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
You know, I don't think I'd mind not being able to find a new job after a $20m golden parachute. I could live quite comfortably on the interest from that without touching the capital...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Any idea where I can get some "bank robbery" insurance? I have this fool-proof plan for making millions in minutes, if I could only get around that "going to jail for decades" bit...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
I realize that you're being rhetorical, so my reply is not directed at you, per se.
If you feel guilty when you copy some media, you've been brainwashed. Copyright law (as it stands) is immoral, and supporting or upholding copyright law is immoral.
If you want to be cynical, CEO's and directors get higher pay because they hold the purse strings. It is pretty rare to see a CEO who's a visionary leader and single-handedly drives a company to fame and fortune. It is nearly always a team effort, even when you *do* have visionary leadership. The CEO and board merely get to claim credit for all successes (and "trim the fat", blame the market, etc. for failures).
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
You miss the REAL point - that if they can get people to think that insurers are liable for copyright infringement fines, the next step is to sue you, and then go after your insurance policy to pay the damages ... after all, your insurer probably has deeper pockets than you do.
How many people will pay up a few bucks rather than have their insurance premiums go through the roof, or even become unable to get insurance.
1. **AAfia sues their own insurers to cover copyright violations.
2. **AAfia sues your insurers to cover copyright violations.
3. Re-invest those PROFITS in more cocaine and hookers (aka business as normal) for lobbyists, etc.
Because the idea of working hard to produce something people want, spending a considerable amount of money to make it available to people, and then expecting recompense is immoral.
Where does copyright fit into that? You can have all of that, not be immoral, and not use copyright at all. Of course, if you actually read the parent's post, he said "Copyright law (as it stands) is immoral," not the idea of copyright in and of itself.
Except they are the ones who are getting the lion's share of the price. The actual artist gets a few pennies if anything (in the case of the songs in question, nothing at all). I'm not saying I have any illegally copied music, but if I did, and there was some way for me to pay a dollar per song to the actual artists, I would do it in a heartbeat. But pay the big labels who are violating copyright themselves? Why would I feel morally obliged to do that?
I think they should publicly kill themselves, to preserve the honor of the company/clients they have disgraced. The RIAA i mean, i don't give a shit about Music Canada.
Actually if you did this you'd get a trillion dollar fine. This is a $200 payment for each song they infringed. Not per copy, per song. They sold them over and over and over and over. They paid a microscopic fraction of the profit they made by selling songs they did not have rights to.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Wait a second there buddy, copyright infringement is a civil matter due to law it is not a moral matter. When people are hungry and you copy a food recipe that makes unpalatable food palatable and you feed who of sane mind would prevent it. When people are celebrating and they play music that brings back their shared memories who of sane mind would prevent it. When people are poor and can barely earn enough to feed clothe and house themselves and can not afford health insurance who in their sane mind would deny the ability to freely copy.
Media content, neither feeds, clothes, houses or heals the public, it is unto itself a parasitic luxury and should be treated as such. When it absorbs too much of the economic effort of the community, when too much community capital is sucked into it's rapacious maw, when it starts to corrupt democracy, then it needs to be curtailed, to be limited.
The RIA* and MIA* it all it's psychopathic and narcissistic drug addled glory can hardly call morals upon any issue at all, these would have to be the most amoral and immoral people on the planet and in truth everything possible should be done to limit their numbers, we certainly shouldn't be encouraging them.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Why would I feel morally obliged to do that?
Because you're ripping off the artist (or author or video game creators, etc.). It may only be a 'few pennies', but that's how creative types make their living.
I'm sorry, but the "I'd rather steal from you than allow the company that publishes you to profit" attitude you see here is too stupid for words.
Say "I can't be bothered" or "it's not worth my while" or "I simply don't care" or whatever. But don't pretend that it isn't stealing from the artists.
As an aside, those big bad labels, publishers, studios, etc. are the reasons why creators who produce the work that thousands buy and would actually like to make a nice lower to middle class living can actually afford to do so. Most creative types I know are desperate to have the opportunity to work for a publisher because that's the only real opportunity to actually make a living doing what they love.
No, if the market doesn't want it, then you starve - no immorality.
But if people are pirating it, then pretty much demonstrably, people want your product. If they're willing to forego it for the price you charge, you also starve - no immorality.
But where they get the benefit of it *and* you don't get recompense you asked. *That's* immoral.
Fiorina made millions per year, Jobs made $1 per year. Ergo any company wanting to make billions should pay their CEOs $1 year!
Trolling is a art,
Not too far wrong. Jobs' salary was tiny, but he got a lot of share options. When Apple's value increased by 8,000%, Jobs made an enormous pile of money. If Apple's value had gone down, he'd have made $1/year (or lost money, depending on whether he exercised his options). Ideally, you'd pay your CEO something close to minimum wage (enough to live on, because you don't want only independently rich people to be qualified, but not enough to make them rich, or even particularly comfortably off), but then you'd link all of the rest of their income to the company's performance. Even more ideally, you'd set up their share options so that they couldn't sell the majority until five years after they left, so if they didn't choose a competent successor and leave the company in a long-term manageable state they'd lose too. With share options set up the way they currently are, it's typically a good strategy for a CEO to make massive cuts to R&D, wait for the share price to increase as the short-term profits double from not investing anything in growth, and then quit the company, sell the shares, and find another company to break.
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I do understand the way you feel, and it is a valid objection, but just for argument's sake, imagine you see a beggar in the street, and you know he's homeless and hungry, and you want to help by giving him some money, but there's a big Maffia thug (obviously well fed, with a fancy car parked across the street) standing next to him and declaring that for every dollar you give to the bum, you have to give 20 dollars to the thug. Would you still give the money to the bum? Or would you walk away? Of course the beggar might say "but the thug is protecting me, he got me this spot, without him I wouldn't be able to beg here!". Still, I don't think many people would help the bum.
Now of course I do understand that this is the only way for many artists to get a living, and by not buying their music we are denying them their little bit of income, but that justification gets weaker and weaker the more you here about abuse by the labels. The thugs are even snatching the pennies away whenever the bums aren't looking. And they are denying them the right to do anything without them, treating them like slaves. And why should I pay for a ringtone, for example? In that case, the artist isn't getting anything whatsoever, thanks to some lawsuit the greedy labels won! This sort of bull shit takes away 90% of the motivation from people who might turn from piracy to decent buying.
Yes, there's still a little bit of a feeling left of "doing the decent thing", and "supporting the artists", but not as much as there could be if the labels were honest.
Would a long time pirate want to legalize his music collection by paying $1000 to the artists once he got well off financially? Maybe, seriously. Would he pay $10 to the artists and $990 to the labels? After reading one of many articles about the labels ripping off the artists? No way.
What policy do I have to take out in order for my insurance company to be on the hook for liabilities from illegal activities that I choose to engage in? I'm pretty sure there were some tidy paragraphs in my policies stating that I'm essentially fucked if damages occur due to me breaking the law. My homeowners won't pay shit if I burn down my house trying to run a meth lab, for example. If I go on a crime spree and try to make a high-speed getaway and destroy my car in the progress, I'm betting my auto insurance company will tell me to fuck off. Do I have to incorporate in order to get the awesome "Get away with murder" insurance policy that these companies (seem to think they) have?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Which has little to do with current copyright law, as the other poster suggested.
Granted - except that the context of the morality of copyright law comment was in reply to a comment about the morality of piracy. In other words, the clear implication was not that there are severe problems with aspects of the copyright law, but that the entire concept of ownership of one's intellectual work was immoral.
Now of course I do understand that this is the only way for many artists to get a living, and by not buying their music we are denying them their little bit of income
Why do people keep throwing this argument into the air?!?!?! NO! No they are not getting their living from that. They are not even REMOTELY getting a living from that.
CONCERTS! LIVE SHOWS! THAT'S where they get money. They do not get money from the labels (ignoring the handful of pennies mentioned above, which is a microscopic fraction of what they make playing live).
You can't make one song and then live off of it forever, just like I can't build someone's house and keep getting paid by them for as long as they live there. Life doesn't work that way. Why do people keep thinking artists have a free pass to infinite money after making a song?
Coincidentally, tonight I will be seeing a band live. I paid for the ticket, and I plan to buy a shirt. Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of people, almost every day for as long as their tour is. THAT is how they can feed and clothe themselves.
I agree with your post in general about how the Labels may well help demotivate purchase, although I am suspicious of how many use this as simply an excuse to hang their "I'd rather not pay" hat.
However, I have to say that as I've gotten older, I've realized that sadly the world doesn't beat a path to the door of the better mousetrap builder. i.e. the *AA's may be awful in all sorts of ways, but the sad truth is that they're vital to the industry and always will be. I suspect that if they went down, perhaps 5% of the consumers and 5% of the artists would be subjectively better off.
The reality is that a *lot* of young people *like* the super-hyped product that spending millions and millions allows you to make. Without the millions (and the culture of indulgence and greed that goes along with it), it's not that it would be replaced with something from the grass-roots, it could simply die. There's no law that says their has to be a thriving market. Look at a lot of developing markets where the popular culture is American because the local markets where pirated into non-existence (Hong Kong films, anyone?)
There are all sorts of cultural phenomenon that don't have a lot of money associated with them that amuse, interest, and inflame the passions of tens of thousands of young people. Unfortunately, tens of thousands are essentially irrelevant from a gross cultural perspective. If you want various artistic endeavors to be culturally relevant to hundreds of millions, then you are going to have big (which essentially equals evil in many people's eyes) companies involved.
In other words, I don't think the *AA's are mafioso preventing artists from reaping their rewards - they simply are providing a vital service that they then exploit for maximum profit. Although from my understanding, maximum profit is not all that much, relatively speaking. (And remember, economics dictates that if they aren't earning a decent profit, they'll be closed down and the money used by the investors to do something that will make a profit.)
So, I do think the *AA are probably immoral and definitely stupid, I think the music world would be a lot worse off without them.
No, what's immoral is the life+70 years monopoly before it enters the public domain, DMCA, and many other faults of copyright law. The ludicrously long term hinders creativity. The DMCA makes backing up data you've paid good money for illegal.
Keeping what I've already paid for away from me is immoral. Taking what belongs to we, the people (art and literature) is immoral. Copyright law is in terrible need of reform. Power needs to be taken form the entertainment companies and given to the people who actually create the art and literature.
How is that life+75 years going to entice Jimi Hendrix of Janice Joplin to produce more works? It doesn't. It's a disincentive to the record companies to record someone new; they can still make money off the old. Make the term 20 years and an artist won't be able to retire on the revenues of a single work.
Free Martian Whores!
This is exactly the system I've talked about for years. Too many directors care only about pumping up the short term profitability or share prices of a company so they can make it look like they're doing a fantastic job, leave with a golden handshake and watch the company meltdown from a safe distance a few years later. There is absolutely no incentive at the moment to ensure the long term health of a company. It's exactly the same situation with governments - pretty much every political part in government cares more about being re-elected than ensuring the long term health of the country, that's why we often see big tax cut incentives right before an election even if it's not in the country's interest, because who wants to be the government to put taxes up and help your opponents to get elected with a healthy public chest? The incentives for business and politics are all wrong and that's why the world is in such a huge financial mess.
Only if we the public do it.
GP said copyright law as it stands, not the very idea of copyright law. Most people don't have a problem with artists being rewarded for their efforts, since the public benefits from their work, but a lot of people increasingly feel copyright law is now weighted too far against the public good. I can see the appeal in doing a piece of work today and wanting to get paid for it over and over for my lifetime plus seventy years, unlike the RIAA I can also see how that's perhaps a little unfairly weighted. I know a lot of people just want free stuff, but there are also a lot of other people who are happy to have a system of copyright for a sane period, don't assume that someone saying the current system is broken is automatically in the former camp, there still exist a few voices of reason holding the middle ground of the debate.
Outside of replacing your "No, what's" with "It is", I'd agree with your most of your post.
Heck, I'd even say that pirating a work that where the creator has been dead for a decade is not terribly immoral.
But then we both know that's not what's being pirated, don't we?
In other words, problems with copyright law are being used as a moral smoke-screen to justify pirating what artists produced last month or year and companies are still spending millions making available to the public.
Indeed, it seems that a lot of music is "pirated" and shared by kids and students. When they grow up, those are the same people who will be buying your expensive show tickets/merchandise/hits albums. Pursuing them in the courts (when they demonstrably don't have the money anyway - people who have the disposable income seem more than happy to pay for their downloads) is just going to alienate tomorrow's profit streams. This just boils down to greed - the labels realise they're already earning lots, but they want to earn lots more. Even drug dealers are smart enough to figure out free samples are the best way to guarantee a future income, you'd think music execs (who by all accounts mix in similar circles) could get there with a little help.
I've realized that sadly the world doesn't beat a path to the door of the better mousetrap builder.
The mousetrap fallacy is a very popular one. However --
the sad truth is that they're vital to the industry and always will be.
Sorry, that's a fallacy as well. Thirty (or even fewer) years ago it was in fact true -- the costs of recording and marketing an album was prohibitive for the average person, but these days the most expensive part of making an album is the musical instruments and amps; studio time is dirt cheap. Duplication is dirt cheap. And there's the internet for it to be heard. What use are the record labels to anyone these days? Their purpose for existance is obsolete.
And in my opinion, culture would be far better off without the likes of Britney Spears or NSync. I hear far better, more original music played by far better musicians in the local bars. Musicians are a dime a dozen, songs should be as well.
Free Martian Whores!
> . If Apple's value had gone down, he'd have made $1/year
That would be nice, but not how options generally work for CEO's, they are generally written below the stock price at issue, and then they are usually re-priced to still pay off if the stock price goes down. By paying in this way, as long as you only exercise the options over a year old, then most of the risk free gains will then be at capital gains rates...
I think you might well be among the 5% who would be better off. However, I still maintain the vast majority of music listeners would be worse off for their lack of Britney or whoever the hot young thing is.
I hear far better, more original music played by far better musicians in the local bars.
Agreed, but how many of them would like to make a living off what they do and how many *actually* make a living off it.
Despite the lowered costs of production, without the promotion of the *AA's, it's almost impossible to make a living in those artistic endeavors. (Pretty damn hard *with* the AA's, but at least remotely possible.) To be perfectly honest, without gatekeepers, most creators struggle to even give away their stuff for free.
Honestly, if I'm going to pretend I care about the creators,then I'm going to listen to them about they'd like to see. And to be honest, most I've talked with would like to see their publishers do reasonably well and see people purchasing their content from the labels, studios and publishers.
Does the CEO make more difference than 100 good engineers? Many of them make that much money or more.
It must be nice to earn enough in just one year to retire comfortably.
The REAL reason CEOs are so well paid is that they sit on each others boards. A, B, and C vote to pay D a king's ransom. In turn, D sits on several boards and votes to pay A, B, and C a king's ransom. It's all other people's money anyway.