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IFPI Won't Share Pirate Bay Damages With Musicians
An anonymous reader tips this news from TorrentFreak:
Earlier this year the sentences against the Pirate Bay defendants were made final. Aside from prison sentences, they will have to pay damages to the entertainment industries, including €550,000 to several major music labels. The court awarded the damages to compensate artists and rightsholders for their losses. However, it now turns out that artists won’t see a penny of the money, as the labels have allocated it to IFPI to fund new anti-piracy campaigns. ...While it may come as no surprise that the music industry has a hard time getting money from The Pirate Bay defendants, what comes next may raise a few eyebrows. 'There is an agreement that any recovered funds will be paid to IFPI Sweden and IFPI London for use in future anti-piracy activities,' IFPI writes. In other words, the money that the Court awarded to compensate artists and rightsholders for their losses is not going to the artists at all."
Stop buying music altogether and this problem will go away...
anyone, including "content creators", who believed IFPI wouldn't pocket the money are idiots.
It's the musicians who sign up to these labels. They're the ones doing work for them. They're the ones who could cause the labels to shrivel and die simply by choosing or building alternative distribution methods.
Worst of all are the half a dozen successes who pretend that these scrounging middlemen act on musicians' behalf, with superstar whores acting no better than the celebrity representatives of Scientology from Bee Gees to Metallica to Lily Allen (only joking, Lily - you're no superstar, you're shit).
Or the people who actually believed that piracy legislation is not about making lawyers richer.
-- no sig today
Not really a surprise indeed, organisations like IFPI and the MAFIAA solely purpose is to earn money for the big media corps not for any artist they own.
It's the musicians who sign up to these labels. They're the ones doing work for them. They're the ones who could cause the labels to shrivel and die simply by choosing or building alternative distribution methods.
Worst of all are the half a dozen successes who pretend that these scrounging middlemen act on musicians' behalf, with superstar whores acting no better than the celebrity representatives of Scientology from Bee Gees to Metallica to Lily Allen (only joking, Lily - you're no superstar, you're shit).
"we call it Riding the Gravy Train."
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
That is using the failed logic that a pirated copy is a lost sale. Also if all funds received from courts for piracy go into fighting it more the artists will never get any of it as it will be a continuous loop.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Except these activities have about as much chance to increase the sales as the Kyoto Protocol has a chance of decreasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere in the next few decades.
Ezekiel 23:20
From TFA:
In other words, the money that the Court awarded to compensate artists and rightsholders for their losses is not going to the artists at all.
This is not a logical conclusion. If anti-piracy activities increase future sales by detering illegal copying, the artists will (proportionately) benefit just as much as the labels.
You do realize that "money that the Court awarded" and "increase future sales" are not the same? One is actual cash, and the other is wishful thinking. So, logically, your second sentence is a non sequitur.
But you kind of hit on the reason why this problem is the fundamental problem, but also why getting musicians to act can't possibly be the solution.
That reason is that people like Lily Allen only succeded in the industry because her dad got her there due to his contacts. The fact is the music industry is absolutely full of acts who just wouldn't have gotten anywhere without the industry to turn them into a product. These artists wont leave the industry because it's the only way they can make a living doing what they love - they sure as hell couldn't go it alone because without the music industry's cartel operation to prop them up they wouldn't stand a chance in a free market where they're competing based on talent.
The industry keeps these people employed as "artists" whilst keeping any uncontrolled real talent that hasn't signed up out. It's a protection racket, unless you sign up you've got no hope, and half those who have signed up signed up because they had no hope otherwise anyway due to them having a severe lack of talent compared to everyone else.
There's just trash after trash after trash - Nikki Minaj seems to be the latest abysmal excuse for an artist that's being thrust repeatedly on the radio here in the UK right now. A few good artists make it through, like Rihanna does actually seem to have some talent, for example, but even they get used as tools to prop up the shite - case in point, I don't know what song it is because I don't care but there was a song on the radio a few weeks back which involved some fairly decent singing from Rihanna and then you get that silly Minaj bitch come on to just completely destroy the track. Had she not had Rihanna to prop up the song most sane people would just completely and utterly ignore the track. Christ, I don't even like this type of music, but again, because of the cartel, there's really little choice to listen to anything else during my commute as it's all the radio stations play in the UK.
Instead, the government kept all of that money justifying that they would/might someday provide Medicare for those people -- despite the fact that most did not receive Medicare benefits! The State governments even announced that they were using the funds to build roads and for other projects!
This is one more demonstration that these types of groups seek to champion causes in order to perpetuate themselves, by keeping up the fight (fear), rather than relaying recovered damages back to those who were harmed. It's disgraceful.
the only way to effectively deal with sociopathy is through bribery.
Or executions.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Why is this allowed? I hope artists get together and sue RIAA/IFPI. As mentioned in other comments, these organizations are nothing more than bullies.
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
This is exactly why I don't buy music from stores. The only discs I have were bought directly from the artist after a live concert. Doing so, I believe I am sponsoring the artist directly because the discs they sell after stage, despite still being produced by their record label, do not contain distribution and retail fees. The disc price might even be higher but that way I really believe I'm sponsoring the artist and not the mafia.
As a side benefit, all of my discs are signed by their respective artists ; )
It's unrealistic to expect that the MAFIAA will be stopped if artists no longer sign with them. There are probably 10,000 - 100,000 artists that sign with them. If some fraction decide to stop, they'll just sign some more to replace them. And what's the average lifetime of most artists nowadays... less than 5 years? So they're easily replaceable.
Besides, these so-called artists don't even really do very much. The MAFIAA makes its killing on the major 'stars' who don't honestly do very much themselves. All they do is find find a woman that has no respect for herself or her image or a boy that'll make 12-year-old girls horny, then they manufacture a song and market the shit out of it. Let's face it - there will always be at least 100 people who are stupid and/or desperate enough in America to enter some kind of ridiculous bargain like this. So there really isn't much of a way to stop these 'artists' from signing them.
Now as for the rest of the artists who aren't stars but still actually make their own work, you could argue that we need to fund independent labels so they don't sign with the corrupt labels, but what do you expect that to achieve? It's gonna take a lot of artists and a lot of marketing to make any success for them.
But regardless, the only hope of breaking these industries is to break their public image. There needs to be created a New World Order of sorts in the music industry, one which will make the current labels look antiquated and corrupt. Explore new revenue models: support real online music stores like Jamendo and Bandcamp that actually support the ones who make the music and cut out the middlemen. If we break their image, then we can start to push them out of the way. They will try to take us back over, but if we tarnish their image so much that they can't recover, then maybe there will be hope
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
A lot of aspiring musicians don't realize how bad the industry is before they sign. Once they sign their first contract, they're pretty much stuck unless they want to break a contract as the companies involved won't release their final contracted album until they sign a new contract.
The court explicitly declared that the money should go to the artists. If the artists decide it should be used for that, fine, but it should be going to the artists first. If they decide to give it to someone else for some other purpose, whatever, but not giving it to the artists is violating a direct court decision.
And how many of those artists do you think are going to risk their careers by standing up and complaining about it?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Those would be somewhat counterproductive for raising teenagers..
Not at all, "Jimmy, clean your room, or else!"
According to this model they would use the money to sue more people in order to get even more money from the state they could use to sue... Anything else would be against the market's principles.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!