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IFPI Won't Share Pirate Bay Damages With Musicians

Posted by Soulskill on from the delivering-on-expectations dept.

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."

5 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. Re:well by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    anyone, including "content creators", who believed IFPI wouldn't pocket the money are idiots.

  2. the problem's not the labels or the customers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

  3. Re:well by justforgetme · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Or the people who actually believed that piracy legislation is not about making lawyers richer.

    --
    -- no sig today
  4. Same As Tobacco Lawsuits by iinventstuff · · Score: 5, Insightful
    In the US, the government sued (and continues penalizing) the tobacco industry, because their product causes "wrongful death", "injury", and causes the individual to require significant medical expenses. This product causes all of those things, so the lawsuits were justified. However, one would have thought that at least some of the $16B recovered by 2006 would have been given to the smokers who were suffering.

    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.

  5. Re:well by jez9999 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    the only way to effectively deal with sociopathy is through bribery.

    Or executions.

    --
    == Jez ==
    Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.