p2pnet - rss feed: CD Wow to pay labels $81 million
p2pnet.net news:-CD Wow has been ordered to pay a Big 4 music cartel ‘trade’ company some £41 million (today about $80,994,655) for breaking UK import rules.
And downloading wasn’t an issue.
“The High Court in London ruled in March that the site’s owners, Music Trading Online, were ‘in substantial breach’ of a 2004 agreement to stop importing CDs,” ordering the company to pay “£37m plus interest to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI),” says the BBC.
The story has ceo Henrik Wesslen declaring, “We are the little guys selling CDs to the UK market and they (the BPI) have picked on us for that reason. Other bigger sites doing the same thing have been left alone.”
According to The Times Online, CD Wow imported cheap CDs from Hong Kong, “but promised as long ago as 2004 to stop the practice.” But earlier in the year it was found guilty of continuing the trade.
“Yesterday CD Wow - a privately held company with little-known British and European founders - said that the BPI was able to cite only 39 instances of the rules being breached, a fraction of the 10,000 CDs it ships a day,” says the story.
But, “CD-Wow is no consumer champion,” stated the BPI’s Geoff Taylor, says the BBC.
With retail sales of £21.7m in the UK in 2005, CD Wow was the third largest online music retailer in the UK after Amazon and Play, says the story. It said it hadn’t deliberately broken its 2004 court promise to stop buying CDs in places like Hong Kong and passing them on to consumers in the UK at discounted prices.
The multi-billion-dollar Big 4, EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and Warner Music (US), claim they’re being “devastated” by file sharing and counterfeiters and duplicators, whom they called pirates.
“Music is available much more cheaply in Asia than in the UK because it is believed that it is not possible to charge much in countries like India and China, where piracy is rampant,” The Times Online states going on.
“Record companies charge wholesale prices estimated to be as low as £1 or £2, compared with £6 in the UK, making it theoretically possible to charge far lower prices if the items are imported.”
Meanwhile, “In a statement, CD Wow said the British courts had set a “dangerous precedent,” adds the BBC.
“I fear what is happening is an attempt to use the combined brute force of the record industry to force the retailers and, in turn, our clients, to keep lining the pockets of the fat cat executives,” it quotes Wesslen as saying.
“It shouldn’t matter whether we are buying from an official distributor in the UK, Europe or the Far East, what is important is that we are buying legitimate products from the record companies themselves.”
Also See:
BBC - Record companies win £41m damages, May 30, 2007
The Times Online - CD Wow pays high price for selling cheap music in UK, May 30, 2007
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
May 30th, 2007 at 10:24 am
In the U.S. you hear shitheads like Bush go on and on and on about “free” trade. Outsourcing jobs, no tariffs on imported goods(even if the exporting country has tariffs on U.S. goods), everything is laissez faire. Unless it benefits the consumer over big business, such as reimporting goods that have been sold cheaply elsewhere, like prescription drugs, and apparently CD’s too. Companies should be forced to take the good with the bad, if they want the government to leave them alone in their trading practices, they should not get any help when trade works against them.
May 30th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
There is aother reason why imports of CDs are discouraged.
A record company that sells records without authorization from a British songwriter or without paying rayalties to the songwriter has no likely legal problem if the records are only sold outside Britain, as the British songwriter will not sue abroad because of its cost and risks (corrupt judges).
When someone imports the infringing records into Britain, the label becomes exposed to lawsuits. Whereas if a British company infringes the copyright of a song in Hong Kong the British courts will no take an infringement case, unless the records were also sold in Britain.
Surely a record that a British record company sells in both Britain and Hong Kong does not infringe but the same record company may have many record that it sells in Hong Kong or abroad that it does not sell in Britain because of the legal “infringement” risks.
For record producers at other countries it is the same thing.
The no import rule is part of the scam to avoid royalty payments to songwriters.
From personal experience….
Another point, BPI is not a record producer nor a copyright holding company, as is its members are. BPI is more of a monopoly seeking cartel like RIAA. How is it that they can sue and get paid? Odd to me.