p2pnet.net News:- Are elements of the music industry starting to realise just how much trouble they’re in with the music buying public?

At a time when the Big Five record labels routinely victimize innocent men, women and children such as Brianna LaHara for ‘violating’ copyrights by sharing music online, one of the companies – Sony – decided to go easy on a school which burned copyrighted songs onto 500 CDs and then distributed them so students could remember their prom night.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), you’ll recall, sued 12-year-old Brianna for downloading If You’re Happy and You Know It and the theme to the television series Family Matters, among other tracks.

Not at all incidentally, last weekend Chippewa Falls High School – Chi-Hi for short – in Wisconsin staged its annual school prom and as part of the event, distributed 500 CDs.

The prom committee bought the custom CD for $3.69 each, paid for with proceeds from junior class fundraisers and other proms. The CDs were given to 500 people who’d each paid $14 to attend the prom.

“We use the funds to offset the costs of the prom and if there’s anything left over, it goes into the senior class fund,” Chi-Hi principal Dr Jim Sauter told p2pnet.

The prom committee had burned the Bangles’ ‘Walk Like an Egyptian, Sara Evans’ ‘Born to Fly’ and ‘100 Years’ by Five for Fighting onto to them and No, the committee hadn’t considered the possibility that it might have been breaking anyone’s copyright.

Nor, apparently, had Stumps, the company which supplied the CDs.

In a catalogue, it had suggested making CDs, Sauter told p2pnet. And, “Record songs from prom night on CDs and store them in imprinted cases for memories that will last a lifetime,” said a catalogue, quoted in a Chippewa Herald story here.

Sauter told us the thought that burning and then distributing the CDs might bring unwanted attention from the music industry hadn’t occurred to anyone.

But it had occurred to the local newspaper which contacted Eugene Quinn, a patent attorney and law professor at Syracuse University (which is having its own problems centering on the music industry) asking what kind of danger the school was in.

Predictably, Quinn issued dire warnings.

“This might be big enough for the RIAA to follow up on,” he told Chippewa Herald reporter Jeff Hage. “What the recording industry does is pick someone who has a clear infraction and make an example of them.”

The bottom line, Quinn said, was that burning the CDs wasn’t unlike stealing from the recording artists, who count on the royalties from music sales and, “Burning 500 CDs could get the recording industry’s attention,” Quinn said. “A handful doesn’t. Hundreds do.”

However, the copyrights to all three songs are owned by Columbia records, in turn owned by Sony, and, says the Herald:

“Columbia told school officials that the record company would grant retroactive licensing to the school for three songs that were burned onto a CD used as prom gift on May 8,” going on to quote Sauter as saying of record company officials, “They were very non-judgemental. They said they get hundreds of request like ours every month.”

In the meanwhile, adds the story, when the dust clears, Sauter said the school might send the catalog company a letter.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 15th, 2004 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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