Whose rights have been infringed? The songwriter rights who are the legal beneficial owners of whatever rights they assigned to the publisher BMG.

Who are the infringers? BMG and Vivendi.

This is why they go after kids that share music with such vigor. To hide their own real large scale infringements.

I suggest that this be a cause for a full fledged investigative story by p2pnet and others. The worst copyright infringers should be exposed for what they are.

Would that not have have been detected by the European Union regulators who approved the deal?

I believe that this issue has never been raised and I know of no claim for a share of a song’s sale price (100 percent pofit for BMG?) by a songwriter.

Maybe songwriters have never met a smart lawyer!

Another issue is if songwriters need to authorize their publisher to sell what is in effect an obligation by the publisher to the songwriter (to exploit their music) to another party, who, by the way may have no experience exploting music or worse, who may have a reputation of not paying due royalties to songwriter or who may operate in a different country.

What I have described above is happening all the time and no one questions the legality of reselling song assignments to third party publishers that have a lousy reputation and even located in another country, when the logical thing is that if a publisher wants to leave the publishing business, they should simply return the rights to the songwriters so these can contract whatever publisher they choose or become independent publishers themselves.

Here is what I may ask for if I had a publisher and that publisher wanted to sell my music to another publisher which I qualified as a good one that resides in my own country and one with succesful experience in marketing my type of music: “Sell the music but give me all the sale money”. The reason is that the original assignment meant that the publisher was to make money from the exploitation of the music, not from the sale of it to a third party.

BTW, dealing with publisher that reside in foreign contries is a legal nightmere.

I guss a bunch of German songwriters will now have their songs managed from now on by some foreigner who is not interestied in exploiting german songs composed by a songwriter the foreigner has no idea who is. A terrible situation.

Even though I have nothing negatibe to say about Vivendi, who could turn out to be a better publisher than BMG, the whole thing smacks of taking advantage of sonwriter’s legal naiveness and legal representation weakness.