Feynman: For any technological society to succeed, sound science must take precendence over ideological conviction, because nature cannot be fooled.
Dr. Robin: In my opinion, the Bush administration's failure to understand this concept presents a grave danger to our country and to the world.
AH, but you missed something: The ultra-conservatives have long-since hijacked the phrase "Sound Science". They take advantage of the fact that most science is really just probabilities and management of uncertainties, to spread REAL uncertainty and doubt among the people. Thus, things that help the environment, based on "sound science", are really only happening because the damage has already been done (think Bush's recent grants to florida's everglades, prior to hurricane season).
Otherwise, they use "Sound Science" as an excuse to postpone ANY regulation of the environment (a-la the mountaintop-destroying mining going on in West Virginia right now, destroying millions of miles of rivers that will eventually have a direct impact on their own grand Potomac). Until is proven to be "Sound", it means nothing to them.
after upgrading, only 2 of mine are still dead: "Down Them All!" (creates a dialog that allows one to set filters and download any and all links, like if you were looking at a page of thumbnails or mp3 links and wanted them all), and "ieview".
i'll live, though I hope downthemall gets fixed soon...
more than half of my extensions, even if they really are compatible with firefox 1.0, still say they're only good for 0.9.x+, not 0.9+, which means that firefox 1.0 won't install and use them.
biggest pain in the ass -- firefox won't let the user override an extension's compatibility setting.
I can only hope they all change their settings soon...
Artists don't make any money on touring either, unless they're already mainstream and touring arenas and stadiums. merchandising gets them an "advance" in much the same way that the recording contract does.
otherwise, a tour for a non-supergroup that only hits small clubs (200-800 per venue) can easily leave a group $50K in the whole. That $50K is usually covered by "tour support", from the record label, recouped from royalties (yeah, that key phrase again), contributing to the slavery of the artist to the label.
In truth, there's almost no way to "make money" in the music industry as such. Artists look "rich" because of how they choose to spend a portion of their advance. The best one can do is make sure that their expenses fall under their advance to make something of a profit and keep a middle-class lifestyle going.
in other words, to become a businessperson, not an artist.
two quotes:
"The primary concern of the musician is music. The primary aim of the professional musician is business." -- Robert Fripp
"I read music, not bank statements." -- Sting.
Re:those statistics don't tell everything
on
Is IP Property?
·
· Score: 1
Sometimes I wish Hollywood would just stay the hell away from the Democratic party. I really don't think they do any good for the Democrats other than providing funds to the party, and their cozy relationship seems to get Democrats to look the other way when this kind of nasty, thoroughly unliberal legislation gets pushed through.
This is, of course, precisely why Hollywood buddy-buddies the Democratic party. Hollywood itself hits the democrats for support, while their mainstream global conglomerates that own half of Hollywood (Sony, GE, or AOL, for example) hit the Republicans, and boom, BOTH parties cater to the whims of the entertainment industry.
Its how it works. Both parties cater to the demands of the entertainment industry -- to Republicans for deregulation, to Democrats for freedom of speech, and both parties give Hollywood all the IP protection they want because that's the *easy* part.
Actually managing deregulation and freedom of speech is the hard part.
Re:those statistics don't tell everything
on
Is IP Property?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Congressman Boucher (from the district of Virginia that includes Virginia Tech) is more anti-IP than most. He's been mentioned on slashdot for trying to stand up for consumers rights.
Naturally, with big corporations paying most congressional lobbies, his efforts are generally ignored by the main legislation.
well, for a while, cellphones with palmos were stuck to 160x160 pixels (absolutely useless for pretty much anything, IMHO), and cell phone 'net is dog-slow (slower than normal dial-up at times).
finally, a phone with palmos is just that: a phone. with a ton of bells and whistles, but really people are only using it as a phone with some form of messaging. the idea of it being a personal organizer with web access first, phone second, simply isn't there.
this is trying that other route -- have a PDA organizer with web access first, eventual phone second, which can use 802.11b voip as one of several ways of getting the word out, so to speak.
in the end, is there any "killer app" for PDAs? no. trying to network them up with FAST networks (as opposed to cellphone nets) is one more way of trying to create an environment in which, maybe, SOMEBODY will build the "killer app".
this is just like their having included real (audio) player with any palmos-5.2 systems, making a palm into a small mp3 player. trying to find something that can finally be the "oh, i gotta get me one of them" hook.
so far, no PDA has it yet. the phones + pda capabilities are selling a little bit better simply because they're not all that much more expensive than normal cell phones, not because they've got a killer app that main-line palms don't.
The main thing you gain by being 'net connected 24x7 is the same as any other portable with a 'net -- the ability to use the web and other services without a cable.
so what services are there in particular?
AvantGo, as a web browser, becomes more useful because it includes the capability to sync up independent of the rest of the PDA's sync. Because the list of pages I want to sync with is stored at avantgo's server, it can do that without having to access my local machine.
second, and naturally enough, you have email access as soon as you hit a 'net, so like any good tool the first thing anybody's going to use it for is email.
finally, "real" web browsers (As opposed to download and surf locally systems like avantgo) will come about. they aren't there now because the 'net wasn't there in any consistent form. Really, if there wasn't a consistent network, no good network software would be written. now that palm is offering a consistent network, people will write better network software. you can't write software for hardware that doesn't really exist and expect anybody to use it.
i was referring to information about the abstract "you" and "your" behaviours. I am in control of what goes into my credit report, for example. things don't show up with without either my action (i filed and received said credit) or my ability to counter it (identity theft).
a black-box in an automobile, on the other hand, is collecting data on me without my ability to challenge it, or to decide that i don't want that data collected at any particular point. its collecting information on me that i have no control over.
like with buying a product with cash to avoid a credit card trail, i should have the ability to control whether or not my actions get permanently traced.
no, i'm not going to go rob a bank or intentionally hit anybody or anything like that...but i don't want *my* freedom to make that decision in someone elses hands, nor do i want someone to take that information about me and use it to make decisions about me that i can't challenge.
speed limits along residential roads are partially set to protect children, but actually are more often set to control noise.
in Sterling, there's a 4-lane divided road through town, with service roads, meaning cars in the main road are 45+ feed away from the sidewalk that any kid might walk along......but the speed limit is still 35 (often exceeded during day time).
turns out the reason is not safety (the road in and of itself qualifies for a 45), but noise. cars and trucks driving a steady 35-40 are much quieter than vehicles accelerating to try to get back up to 55mph.
because if i was driving SLOWER than the pack in front of me, i would get quickly swallowed up by the pack behind me doing that same speed. packs work that way in highway traffic, if you've ever paid attention to it.
just because a ton of cars are in front of me that i don't want to catch up with doesn't mean there aren't a ton of cars behind me that i would rather not have amongst me.
i want to drive alone in order to avoid being near cars at all, because i trust myself and my driving. i do NOT trust them.
thing is, there's over the speed limit, and then there's driving faster than the flow of traffic.
I could easily have been over the speed limit, along with everybody else who drives 70mph on 28 near dulles airport outside DC. so yeah, i'm speeding, but i'm not the traffic risk. the guy doing 90 and changing lanes like he's in Le Mans IS, and if he hits me, its his fault no matter what speed i was doing.
in fact, in that circumstance (VERY common near DC) if I was doing the 55 speed limit, i would be presenting even MORE of a risk to getting hit by mr. 90mph.
so i'm not saying i wasn't speeding, i'm saying i was not a threat to the flow of traffic which the other individual was. should i be penalized because I was trying NOT to be a threat to traffic?
speeding is, in spite of everything they try to do with their fucking cameras and crap, a relative crime, not an absolute, and any attempt to make it an absolute simply causes traffic to STOP at the places they do it at, or penalizes the poor and middle class while the rich pay the fines (without point penalty or chance of losing their license) as if it was just a "tax in order to have the right to speed".
its a cheap tax to them.
i'm bitter about this because I got a camera-ticket a few weeks back because I 1) was driving the same speed as everybody else, but 2) had backed off just enough so that I was effectively driving "alone" (nobody near me at the time). I do this because I can't trust the other drivers to not change lanes without looking (i've had dozens of near-misses because people suck) so i match speeds with the "packs" but considerably behind them.
This means, of course, that I can get picked off like any prey not hiding among the herd. I get penalized because I was trying to remain in a safe situation where i wasn't getting swallowed up in a pack of cars full of drivers who can't drive for shit.
Because once its in there and shows positive statistics, the government might mandate it.
And once THAT happens, it becomes information they could subpoena.
So you get into an accident that you *know* was the other guys fault, but your little black box says you were speeding slightly at the time, and the courts could quickly decide that you really were partially at fault and force your insurance company to pony up (and thus increase your rates) where now the other guys insurance would have to pick it up.
Information you are not in control of will be used to control you. Better it simply not exist at all.
as kids get into CS when there seems to be interesting things to do with computers.
The early PC boom of '81-'85 is one example, where JMU had about 200 CS majors. By the time the IBM-PC took over the world ('89), the general feeling was static, of things not really changing, not being interesting, not being worth a career. JMU's CS class of '93 (my class) was only 24 graduates -- and those of us who were programmer-hackers tended to prefer hanging out on the Unix boxes or the Vax/VMS system over the stoic IBM-PC (which we only went over to for playing games).
5 years later, in the midst of the internet and dot-com boom, things looked interesting and promising and people were really doing "new" things (in spite of what the granted patents of the time would tell us) and CS seemed an interesting thing to get into again. JMU's CS graduates got up to about 125 / year.
So now, the rush to do "new" stuff of the dot-com era is gone, people are back to just doing work for businesses that pay, which is rarely interesting, and the military has slowed down its spending on software in order to pay for the replacement weapons we've been detonating all over the mid-east. Add the outsourcing demonstrated by the dot-bomb fallout and it leads people to think that CS and the software industry is just business and not interesting (or lucrative) enough to bother with.
something will arrive in a couple of years which nobody would have predicted (hint: it isn't Longhorn, and like Netscape it WON'T come from Microsoft) and will spin the cycle round again.
well, the warnings and messages may be three years old or more, but Ridge and Ashcroft have shown that this does not in any way diminish their importance to the American People's safety and security.
yeah, i can (through your argument) see the Lacy Peterson Law as being a good balance between acknowledging/protecting the unborn child and at the same time avoiding making any particular statement as to the "rights" of the child as a person or citizen (which can open itself up to interpretations that can affect the great Abortion debate in this country and cause undue duress in the system).
Or the cops have been following the example of Law & Order -- you know, charge them with Murder 2 in order to get a plea bargain on Manslaughter.
but yeah, the idea that you need "special" laws for "special" cases, like killing a pregnant person, or driving with a cell phone (as opposed to the general "distracted driving" laws that every state has), or "killing a fellow teen as a gang-related crime" vs "killing a teen", or any of those damned things.
all it does is complicate things and make the lawyers very happy for the higher amount they can charge their clients...
On #1: For an album, the above royalties would be multiplied by the number of songs on the album. For example, if 10 songs were included on an album and each received an 8 royalty, a total of 80 in mechanical royalties would be generated from the sale of each album. Thus, if the album sells between 1,000,000 and 10,000,000 copies, the combined writer and publisher royalties for the album would range from $800,000 to $8,000,000. Mechanical royalties are paid by the record company to the music publisher or its representative (frequently The Harry Fox Agency), who then shares them with the writer. Simple, right? Wrong...(better read on!)..." -- source
guess what? the record company pays ASCAP, and ASCAP pays the artist/publisher (which actually tends to go back to the label to pay the artist, because labels usually require the artist to sign away their ownership of their copyrights to the label). Do you really think ASCAP gives all that money back to the artist/label? No! they take thier cut for processing it all.
THEREFORE, ASCAP collects money on every CD purchased.
on #2: independent stations not on label payola still pay for their stuff, and not every label (especially independents) can afford to play the payola game, yet the stations (especially "alternative ones") still have to get the CDs to play.
On #3: most retail locations DO have to pay. Often, especially when processing "muzak", the royalty rates are handled as part of the contract for the music service. shopping malls and strip malls, for the sake of simplicity, often handle the royalty contracts with the publishing companies for the artist and recoup that as a line item in the building lease contract with the individual shop.
you play your own radio in your own shop long enough, and ASCAP will come visit.
this is what flanagans was trying to do, since they had live irish-pub entertainers. ASCAP caught them on the arraingment. The artists played his own arraingment of a traditional tune, and ASCAP sued saying it was based on an ASCAP-protected arraingment.
effectively for ASCAP, there is no public domain. no matter how old something is, your rendition HAS to be based on something they have protected. you have to defend your arraingments' originality in court, or settle and pay the stupid fees.
however, you'll still be harrassed by ASCAP on a weekly or daily basis with them inserting undercover operatives listening to the material and taking notes strictly for the purpose of trying to catch you playing something you shouldn't have. Even BMI licensed material isn't safe from ASCAP, as again they have a knack for suing just for the arraingment copyrights.
you'll win in court, but only if you can afford the lawyers to protect you. and remember THEIR lawyers will be paid 10 times as much. and rarely lose.
ascap will sue your bar even if you only have artists playing their on (non-ascap) original material. its an extortion racket and everybody knows it. they certainly have the legal clout. they claim that 84% of their royalties go directly to the artists (mind you, much of it distributed based on radio airplay, regardless of the money's source).
however, 16% of $1.6 BILLION pays for a LOT of lawyers.
for example, if you only do public domain material, "trad arr." and all that, they'll still sue you because they can decide that your arraingment wasn't original, but based on an arraingment that is ASCAP protected. you can't win.
and a restaurant DOES have to pay ASCAP licensing, even if they only play the radio. all stores do.
yes, that means ASCAP gets paid 3 times over. 1) the radio station purchases the CD to play, at a higher rate than our retail version, and ASCAP gets their cut. 2) the radio station pays its broadcast license. 3) the restaurant or retail location pays a broadcast license based on the # of customers they have on average in the store at any time.
Slashdot Mirror
Feynman: For any technological society to succeed, sound science must take precendence over ideological conviction, because nature cannot be fooled.
Dr. Robin: In my opinion, the Bush administration's failure to understand this concept presents a grave danger to our country and to the world.
AH, but you missed something: The ultra-conservatives have long-since hijacked the phrase "Sound Science". They take advantage of the fact that most science is really just probabilities and management of uncertainties, to spread REAL uncertainty and doubt among the people. Thus, things that help the environment, based on "sound science", are really only happening because the damage has already been done (think Bush's recent grants to florida's everglades, prior to hurricane season).
Otherwise, they use "Sound Science" as an excuse to postpone ANY regulation of the environment (a-la the mountaintop-destroying mining going on in West Virginia right now, destroying millions of miles of rivers that will eventually have a direct impact on their own grand Potomac). Until is proven to be "Sound", it means nothing to them.
after upgrading, only 2 of mine are still dead: "Down Them All!" (creates a dialog that allows one to set filters and download any and all links, like if you were looking at a page of thumbnails or mp3 links and wanted them all), and "ieview".
i'll live, though I hope downthemall gets fixed soon...
more than half of my extensions, even if they really are compatible with firefox 1.0, still say they're only good for 0.9.x+, not 0.9+, which means that firefox 1.0 won't install and use them.
biggest pain in the ass -- firefox won't let the user override an extension's compatibility setting.
I can only hope they all change their settings soon...
it disabled too many of the extensions i've come to rely on. i'll wait until the extensions get updated (hopefully they will and soon).
Artists don't make any money on touring either, unless they're already mainstream and touring arenas and stadiums. merchandising gets them an "advance" in much the same way that the recording contract does.
otherwise, a tour for a non-supergroup that only hits small clubs (200-800 per venue) can easily leave a group $50K in the whole. That $50K is usually covered by "tour support", from the record label, recouped from royalties (yeah, that key phrase again), contributing to the slavery of the artist to the label.
In truth, there's almost no way to "make money" in the music industry as such. Artists look "rich" because of how they choose to spend a portion of their advance. The best one can do is make sure that their expenses fall under their advance to make something of a profit and keep a middle-class lifestyle going.
in other words, to become a businessperson, not an artist.
two quotes:
"The primary concern of the musician is music. The primary aim of the professional musician is business." -- Robert Fripp
"I read music, not bank statements." -- Sting.
Sometimes I wish Hollywood would just stay the hell away from the Democratic party. I really don't think they do any good for the Democrats other than providing funds to the party, and their cozy relationship seems to get Democrats to look the other way when this kind of nasty, thoroughly unliberal legislation gets pushed through.
This is, of course, precisely why Hollywood buddy-buddies the Democratic party. Hollywood itself hits the democrats for support, while their mainstream global conglomerates that own half of Hollywood (Sony, GE, or AOL, for example) hit the Republicans, and boom, BOTH parties cater to the whims of the entertainment industry.
Its how it works. Both parties cater to the demands of the entertainment industry -- to Republicans for deregulation, to Democrats for freedom of speech, and both parties give Hollywood all the IP protection they want because that's the *easy* part.
Actually managing deregulation and freedom of speech is the hard part.
Congressman Boucher (from the district of Virginia that includes Virginia Tech) is more anti-IP than most. He's been mentioned on slashdot for trying to stand up for consumers rights.
Naturally, with big corporations paying most congressional lobbies, his efforts are generally ignored by the main legislation.
well, for a while, cellphones with palmos were stuck to 160x160 pixels (absolutely useless for pretty much anything, IMHO), and cell phone 'net is dog-slow (slower than normal dial-up at times).
finally, a phone with palmos is just that: a phone. with a ton of bells and whistles, but really people are only using it as a phone with some form of messaging. the idea of it being a personal organizer with web access first, phone second, simply isn't there.
this is trying that other route -- have a PDA organizer with web access first, eventual phone second, which can use 802.11b voip as one of several ways of getting the word out, so to speak.
in the end, is there any "killer app" for PDAs? no. trying to network them up with FAST networks (as opposed to cellphone nets) is one more way of trying to create an environment in which, maybe, SOMEBODY will build the "killer app".
this is just like their having included real (audio) player with any palmos-5.2 systems, making a palm into a small mp3 player. trying to find something that can finally be the "oh, i gotta get me one of them" hook.
so far, no PDA has it yet. the phones + pda capabilities are selling a little bit better simply because they're not all that much more expensive than normal cell phones, not because they've got a killer app that main-line palms don't.
The main thing you gain by being 'net connected 24x7 is the same as any other portable with a 'net -- the ability to use the web and other services without a cable.
so what services are there in particular?
AvantGo, as a web browser, becomes more useful because it includes the capability to sync up independent of the rest of the PDA's sync. Because the list of pages I want to sync with is stored at avantgo's server, it can do that without having to access my local machine.
second, and naturally enough, you have email access as soon as you hit a 'net, so like any good tool the first thing anybody's going to use it for is email.
finally, "real" web browsers (As opposed to download and surf locally systems like avantgo) will come about. they aren't there now because the 'net wasn't there in any consistent form. Really, if there wasn't a consistent network, no good network software would be written. now that palm is offering a consistent network, people will write better network software. you can't write software for hardware that doesn't really exist and expect anybody to use it.
can you stop being such a literalist.
i was referring to information about the abstract "you" and "your" behaviours. I am in control of what goes into my credit report, for example. things don't show up with without either my action (i filed and received said credit) or my ability to counter it (identity theft).
a black-box in an automobile, on the other hand, is collecting data on me without my ability to challenge it, or to decide that i don't want that data collected at any particular point. its collecting information on me that i have no control over.
like with buying a product with cash to avoid a credit card trail, i should have the ability to control whether or not my actions get permanently traced.
no, i'm not going to go rob a bank or intentionally hit anybody or anything like that...but i don't want *my* freedom to make that decision in someone elses hands, nor do i want someone to take that information about me and use it to make decisions about me that i can't challenge.
not always.
...but the speed limit is still 35 (often exceeded during day time).
speed limits along residential roads are partially set to protect children, but actually are more often set to control noise.
in Sterling, there's a 4-lane divided road through town, with service roads, meaning cars in the main road are 45+ feed away from the sidewalk that any kid might walk along...
turns out the reason is not safety (the road in and of itself qualifies for a 45), but noise. cars and trucks driving a steady 35-40 are much quieter than vehicles accelerating to try to get back up to 55mph.
because if i was driving SLOWER than the pack in front of me, i would get quickly swallowed up by the pack behind me doing that same speed. packs work that way in highway traffic, if you've ever paid attention to it.
just because a ton of cars are in front of me that i don't want to catch up with doesn't mean there aren't a ton of cars behind me that i would rather not have amongst me.
i want to drive alone in order to avoid being near cars at all, because i trust myself and my driving. i do NOT trust them.
thing is, there's over the speed limit, and then there's driving faster than the flow of traffic.
I could easily have been over the speed limit, along with everybody else who drives 70mph on 28 near dulles airport outside DC. so yeah, i'm speeding, but i'm not the traffic risk. the guy doing 90 and changing lanes like he's in Le Mans IS, and if he hits me, its his fault no matter what speed i was doing.
in fact, in that circumstance (VERY common near DC) if I was doing the 55 speed limit, i would be presenting even MORE of a risk to getting hit by mr. 90mph.
so i'm not saying i wasn't speeding, i'm saying i was not a threat to the flow of traffic which the other individual was. should i be penalized because I was trying NOT to be a threat to traffic?
speeding is, in spite of everything they try to do with their fucking cameras and crap, a relative crime, not an absolute, and any attempt to make it an absolute simply causes traffic to STOP at the places they do it at, or penalizes the poor and middle class while the rich pay the fines (without point penalty or chance of losing their license) as if it was just a "tax in order to have the right to speed".
its a cheap tax to them.
i'm bitter about this because I got a camera-ticket a few weeks back because I 1) was driving the same speed as everybody else, but 2) had backed off just enough so that I was effectively driving "alone" (nobody near me at the time). I do this because I can't trust the other drivers to not change lanes without looking (i've had dozens of near-misses because people suck) so i match speeds with the "packs" but considerably behind them.
This means, of course, that I can get picked off like any prey not hiding among the herd. I get penalized because I was trying to remain in a safe situation where i wasn't getting swallowed up in a pack of cars full of drivers who can't drive for shit.
Because once its in there and shows positive statistics, the government might mandate it.
And once THAT happens, it becomes information they could subpoena.
So you get into an accident that you *know* was the other guys fault, but your little black box says you were speeding slightly at the time, and the courts could quickly decide that you really were partially at fault and force your insurance company to pony up (and thus increase your rates) where now the other guys insurance would have to pick it up.
Information you are not in control of will be used to control you. Better it simply not exist at all.
as kids get into CS when there seems to be interesting things to do with computers.
The early PC boom of '81-'85 is one example, where JMU had about 200 CS majors. By the time the IBM-PC took over the world ('89), the general feeling was static, of things not really changing, not being interesting, not being worth a career. JMU's CS class of '93 (my class) was only 24 graduates -- and those of us who were programmer-hackers tended to prefer hanging out on the Unix boxes or the Vax/VMS system over the stoic IBM-PC (which we only went over to for playing games).
5 years later, in the midst of the internet and dot-com boom, things looked interesting and promising and people were really doing "new" things (in spite of what the granted patents of the time would tell us) and CS seemed an interesting thing to get into again. JMU's CS graduates got up to about 125 / year.
So now, the rush to do "new" stuff of the dot-com era is gone, people are back to just doing work for businesses that pay, which is rarely interesting, and the military has slowed down its spending on software in order to pay for the replacement weapons we've been detonating all over the mid-east. Add the outsourcing demonstrated by the dot-bomb fallout and it leads people to think that CS and the software industry is just business and not interesting (or lucrative) enough to bother with.
something will arrive in a couple of years which nobody would have predicted (hint: it isn't Longhorn, and like Netscape it WON'T come from Microsoft) and will spin the cycle round again.
as in the micronauts toy and comic book series from the late 1970s.
sure shows the appropriateness of a recent political cartoon from Ben Sargent.
well, the warnings and messages may be three years old or more, but Ridge and Ashcroft have shown that this does not in any way diminish their importance to the American People's safety and security.
yeah, i can (through your argument) see the Lacy Peterson Law as being a good balance between acknowledging/protecting the unborn child and at the same time avoiding making any particular statement as to the "rights" of the child as a person or citizen (which can open itself up to interpretations that can affect the great Abortion debate in this country and cause undue duress in the system).
Or the cops have been following the example of Law & Order -- you know, charge them with Murder 2 in order to get a plea bargain on Manslaughter.
but yeah, the idea that you need "special" laws for "special" cases, like killing a pregnant person, or driving with a cell phone (as opposed to the general "distracted driving" laws that every state has), or "killing a fellow teen as a gang-related crime" vs "killing a teen", or any of those damned things.
all it does is complicate things and make the lawyers very happy for the higher amount they can charge their clients...
On #1: For an album, the above royalties would be multiplied by the number of songs on the album. For example, if 10 songs were included on an album and each received an 8 royalty, a total of 80 in mechanical royalties would be generated from the sale of each album. Thus, if the album sells between 1,000,000 and 10,000,000 copies, the combined writer and publisher royalties for the album would range from $800,000 to $8,000,000. Mechanical royalties are paid by the record company to the music publisher or its representative (frequently The Harry Fox Agency), who then shares them with the writer. Simple, right? Wrong...(better read on!)..." -- source
guess what? the record company pays ASCAP, and ASCAP pays the artist/publisher (which actually tends to go back to the label to pay the artist, because labels usually require the artist to sign away their ownership of their copyrights to the label). Do you really think ASCAP gives all that money back to the artist/label? No! they take thier cut for processing it all.
THEREFORE, ASCAP collects money on every CD purchased.
on #2: independent stations not on label payola still pay for their stuff, and not every label (especially independents) can afford to play the payola game, yet the stations (especially "alternative ones") still have to get the CDs to play.
On #3: most retail locations DO have to pay. Often, especially when processing "muzak", the royalty rates are handled as part of the contract for the music service. shopping malls and strip malls, for the sake of simplicity, often handle the royalty contracts with the publishing companies for the artist and recoup that as a line item in the building lease contract with the individual shop.
you play your own radio in your own shop long enough, and ASCAP will come visit.
this is what flanagans was trying to do, since they had live irish-pub entertainers. ASCAP caught them on the arraingment. The artists played his own arraingment of a traditional tune, and ASCAP sued saying it was based on an ASCAP-protected arraingment.
effectively for ASCAP, there is no public domain. no matter how old something is, your rendition HAS to be based on something they have protected. you have to defend your arraingments' originality in court, or settle and pay the stupid fees.
talk to Dennis, the owner/manager of Flanagan's Irish Bar in Bethesda, MD.
that would be entirely legal.
however, you'll still be harrassed by ASCAP on a weekly or daily basis with them inserting undercover operatives listening to the material and taking notes strictly for the purpose of trying to catch you playing something you shouldn't have. Even BMI licensed material isn't safe from ASCAP, as again they have a knack for suing just for the arraingment copyrights.
you'll win in court, but only if you can afford the lawyers to protect you. and remember THEIR lawyers will be paid 10 times as much. and rarely lose.
ascap will sue your bar even if you only have artists playing their on (non-ascap) original material. its an extortion racket and everybody knows it. they certainly have the legal clout. they claim that 84% of their royalties go directly to the artists (mind you, much of it distributed based on radio airplay, regardless of the money's source).
however, 16% of $1.6 BILLION pays for a LOT of lawyers.
for example, if you only do public domain material, "trad arr." and all that, they'll still sue you because they can decide that your arraingment wasn't original, but based on an arraingment that is ASCAP protected. you can't win.
and a restaurant DOES have to pay ASCAP licensing, even if they only play the radio. all stores do.
yes, that means ASCAP gets paid 3 times over. 1) the radio station purchases the CD to play, at a higher rate than our retail version, and ASCAP gets their cut. 2) the radio station pays its broadcast license. 3) the restaurant or retail location pays a broadcast license based on the # of customers they have on average in the store at any time.
nobody wins except ascap. period.