Guillermo Venegas Lloveras: copywrong
p2pnet news | Music:- When I’m working (and when I’m not) one of my favourite pieces of music is Pablo Casals’ Bach cello suites.
There’s no doubt Casals was a genius. So when he says of Guillermo Venegas Lloveras, “I know of no composer in the history of music who, without study, has composed at his level,” the statement means something.
If the name seems familiar, you’re probably thinking of Rafael Venegas, a frequent p2pnet poster.
He’s also a member of a musical family which, says Venegas, has been royally screwed, blued and tattooed by the corporate music industry.
Rafael recently sent me a link to a YouTube memorial to his father, Guillermo. You’ll find the video posted below this.
Meanwhile, I suggested Rafael might like to write something his musical copyright experiences.
Jon
A copyright story!
The video is Guillermo Venegas Lloveras – Requiem para un artista. Translated from Spanish, Requiem for an artist. In it, Guillermo Venegas Lloveras (GVL) plays his Requiem on the guitar.
The video is a homage to a self-educated composer-poet-philosopher and sometimes amateur painter from the small town of Quebradillas in Puerto Rico, of whom cellist Pablo Casals (one the most admired 20th. Century musicians) said of him: “I know of no composer in the history of music that without study has composed at his level’. A brief bio of GVL can be found at http://www.gvenegas.com
Other YouTube videos with GVL songs are this one, where Puerto Rico’s ‘National Voice’, as Lucecita iscalled, sings Genesis:
Diana Valle sings La muñeca se durmió (The doll is sleeping):
Additional GVL song videos can be found at YouTube and at our web page.
After GVL, who was my father, died in 1993 his music became legally entangled because of contradictory and fraudulent copyrights ownership claims. As a result, we the heirs of GVL have been party to 11 (all music related) lawsuits in the past 10 years and the end is not in sight.
Pub1, a major New York/California music publisher, told us heirs of GVL shortly after GVL died in 1993 that they owned about 30 GVL songs. Then Pub1 refused to show any documentary proof that GVL assigned the song copyrights to them. In 1997, after we insisted we wanted to see the proof they had, Pub1 instead asked us, as owners, to assign the copyrights to them. We said no.
So we sued Pub1 in 2001, as they were licensing the songs through ASCAP and BMI and to a local record company. The court then violated the rules for joining cases and, when requested by Pub1, combined the Pub1 case with another unrelated lawsuit we had also filed against Pub2 (more on them below). What Pub1 did was to get the judge of their choosing to take their case. That judge was the court’s chief judge, who happened to be a friend of Pub1’s local lawyer. Our lawyers did not object to the judge switch. Then our new lawyers, without asking for our permission or even informing us, had the case modified to eliminate the jury trial, as originally required in the two but now joined lawsuits.
Then Pub2, also from New York, ‘convinced’ the widow of GVL in 1996, she has said in a deposition (on another case), that she was the owner of GVL’s music, when in fact she owned nothing of the music because of an exclusion clause in the will of GVL and by a written agreement she signed along with all the heirs. After being ‘convinced’ by Pub2, the widow then assigned the copyrights to Pub2 and shortly thereafter married Pub2’s vice president. Pub2 went so far as copyright registering many of the songs as sole owners. As one can imagine, no one would deal with us when two NY publishers and us, are all claiming ownership of the same song copyrights.
Then a deed, that transfer the non existent widow’s copyrights to Pub2 says that it was made, signed by the parties and notarized, after being ordered so by the local Supreme Court. When I notified the Court, through a complaint, that the deed’s claim meant the theft of the music of GVL was ordered by the Court, the Court claimed that there was no case against the notary-lawyer who made the deed and did nothing about the illegal deed. The fraudulent deed was made at a so-called respectable, large law firm. Clearly my rejected complaint was ‘handled with care’. So, as things stand, the theft f GVL’s music was ordered by the Puerto Rico Supreme Court.
In 2000 the Puerto Rico courts decided that the widow (nor Pub2 by extension) had no rights in the music of GVL whatsoever.
The theft of our songs, the one by the widow-husband-Pub2 group was reported to the FBI.
The FBI said they were too busy with terrorism and could do nothing. It was also reported to the local Justice Department. They took six years to ‘investigate’ and concluded in 2005 that a crime never occurred or, contradictorily, that if it had occurred, the crime had prescribed (by the time they completed a six year investigation). Indeed, strange things happen in our beautiful island.
So we sued Pub2 in 2001. What happened?
For starters, it was determined from discovery documents that Pub1 had acquired most of the songs through a scheme described in a Pub1 internal memo as ‘without the author suspecting we are going to copyright register the songs’.
Pub1’s scheme was probably developed because they though the GVL was the greatest Latin American composer, as revealed by an internal Pub1 songwriter scouting report that more or less says so.
The judge, who never mentioned the ‘without the author suspecting’ Pub1 memo, decided, five months after the trial ended, that the stolen songs belonged to Pub1 because it had ‘timely’ copyright registered the songs. In fact most of the songs were either never copyright registered and some were not even composed by GVL and were in fact stolen from some else. The judge deviated from the plain truth.
Also, the chief judge’s final order/decision had over 200 errors (I stopped counting long ago) of fact or law which can be explained by the fact that Pub1’s local lawyer, now a federal judge, was and is a friend of the judge and that one or more of our lawyers were incompetent or (take a guess). None of the judge’s many and obvious errors were properly or successfully appealed by our lawyers. One error: Per the judge we did not prove that a particular song (Genesis) was performed on a TV program sponsored by a bank. The fact was that the program was the most widely seen program on local TV history, Pub1 and Pub2 both licensed the song for that show and the show’ video and CD and the two publishers admitted collecting over $60,000 for the licenses and an estimated 20,000 videos plus additional CDs of the show’s music were sold. The judge also recognized in his order that the publishers had collected over $125 thousand in royalties for records and performance they unlawfully licensed, but the judge awarded us damages of only $23 thousand when he could have given us $300 thousand for the infringement of the song Genesis, as allowed by copyright law ($150 thousand per publisher) and justified in the case, not one of using a song without a license but of illegally licensing and claiming ownership while destroying the real owners (us) ability to license the song. $23 thousand is a fraction of the money Pub1 and Pub2 illegally made according to the judge.
The details and many documents and names are given on our web page.
In closing arguments, Pub1’s lawyer stated that the reason Pub1 was so unsuccessful (no recordings and no royalties paid to GVL or his heirs) was that no one liked GVL’s music. The lawyer who said that is (or was) the president of a major US lawyer association. This same lawyer and his Puerto Rican sidekick lawyer and now judge asked the court to award Pub1 one million dollars in legal expenses, all to defend their claim that they, and not us were the owners of the songs, the same songs they had asked us to assign to them and the same songs obtained ‘without the author suspecting’. Of course there should normally be no expense for a publisher to prove ownership of a song assigned by a songwriter. All that is required is to pull out a paper from a file, signed by the songwriter and show it. So an expense of a few dollars was turned by the now judge lawyer and his American sidekick into a million dollars claim, which, reminds me of a recent ridiculous damage award in one of these RIAA lawsuits.
At a press conference, three year ago, where I was the main speaker, and the subject was the licensing of Puerto Rican public domain music by Pub2 and to announce a complaint filed at our Justice Department, Pub1’s rep was present. At some point he admitted (it was reported by the press) that Publ1 did indeed obtain music copyrights illegally, but that no one complained, which apparently made it all right. As to the complaint, the Justice Department has never replied to the complaint, issued by dozen local musical personalities. My guess is that the music industry is protected by some strong forces.
Incredibly, the government itself pays to license the public domain music while saying the fraud is not worth fighting over.
Then there are the record companies, including several RIAA ones. After my father’s death we have identified over 75 records in the market with GVL (and now our) songs. About 75 percent of these records have never been licensed or have generated any royalties for us owners. About 25 percent have generated royalties but these were always paid to the Pub1 and Pub2. When we contacted these record companies, they ALL, including the RIAA ones, ignored or lied to us. We have never received a single cent in record royalties after GVL died in 1993, over 14 years ago.
In 2001 we also sued a RIAA member, one of the biggest South American record companies, owned by the wealthiest man in Colombia and his family and ran in the USA by the son of the owner. We sued their American operation. At the time they were selling 24 CD records in the USA alone and had sold over 5 million records, confirmed. One of the records is the highest selling Spanish language record in history, with over five million copies sold. We got damages judgment of 1.6 million dollars, which was reduced to $300 thousand (much less than the unpaid royalties) on appeal, and a legal expenses judgment, over two years ago.
The RIAA member’s solution to their predicament was to ignore the judgments and to close their record operation in the USA, while still maintaining other businesses. But they keep selling the infringing recordings through American dealers on the Internet and in American stores. Also the owners come and go to the USA and no one is arrested. No wonder when I hear any talk about ‘criminal copyright infringement’ or how it is that fighting infringement is a federal government priority I can only laugh.
The above stories are consistent with what my father had said to me, to explain why he was never well economically (he was poor most of his life) and why he and most other composers in Puerto Rico never profited from music, that record companies hardly ever paid any royalties and that to get the music recorded and performed it was necessary to give it away for free to crook American publishers, for nothing in exchange, other than worthless promises. After my father died, what I have found out was that he told me the truth.
The local and American press has never reported anything about our lawsuits. I cannot explain this. A guess is that the press is scared of the courts and shy away from anything that looks like federal (meaning American) judicial corruption.
Finally, good music is dying out here in Puerto Rico, killed by the music industry. But the music industry will no longer be able cover up what they do to songwriters and artists thanks to the web and hopefully the music of GVL and others like him can now rise like a phoenix from the ashes.
Enjoy the video.
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November 7th, 2007 at 11:49 am
I don’t know if this would work(knowing our crappy legal system the thieves may sue you) but have you tried undercutting the people selling GVL records? Frank Zappa had some people selling bootlegs, rather than suing them he re released all the boots under his own label(exactly as is, the only difference being the bootleggers names were removed from the album covers) for far less than what the bootlegs were selling for. The funny thing is, if you sold those GVL albums for say $5.00 each through CD baby or some similar venue you would wind up getting more per cd than if the record companies were selling them and paying you the royalties. If you can’t do that due to copywrite(you should, as you own the song rights, but the system is screwed) you could still release your own compilation cds with the same songs that the record companies are selling. This should at least under cut the record company thieves, as for other people using his songs (radio, artists re doing them)unfortunately you are out of luck unless you can find an honest judge.
November 8th, 2007 at 7:49 am
NO WONDER CULTURE IS DISSAPEARING
to Monkey D. Luffy
The idea is good and may work in some instances. My lawyer is already working on that.
Unfortunately many of the recordings with our songs in the market may not be being sold by the owners of the recordings.
For example the only LP recording my father made as as a singer, made forr a no longer existing label (Montilla Records, a one time major label of spanish classical music) is sold over the Internet (as a CD) and none of the various Internet dealers I was able to send a message (most have no e-mail address, none had a physiscal address) answered my e-mail queries as to who was manufactiring distributing the CDs. I suspect these are pirated copies, as no label is identified with the CD I purchase, with the rights to the recording belonging to us already or to someone who inherited or purchased the assets of a record company but these assets are no longer being exploited.
All of which illustrates one of the many problems with copyright law. The law does not require that all products being sold be traceable to a responsible producer, be it a publisher or record company. This oversight in the law makes piracy, the real one, the real theft, where products are sold without authorization or payment of royalties a common occurance.
And of course the law does nothing to allow the legal production of recordings by either artists or songwriters when the the record company has removed the recording from the market. The law, my opinion, should allow artists and sonwriters or perhaps anyone with authorization from the artist or the songwriter to produce the recordings of the music/songs. As it is many artists go to the troble of making a recording that then dissapear from the market while tha copyright law says the ide is to create an incentive for the creators. What a crap. No wonder culture is dissapearing.