RIAA copyright cash: where it went
p2pnet news | RIAA News:- "When the RIAA sues a student for sharing files or a company for infringing its copyrights, they’re fond of trotting out the artists they represent, claiming that infringement steals from them," posts Eliot Van Buskirk on Wired’s Listening Post.
He goes on, "As it turns out, artists may not be receiving their fair share of the hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements that EMI, Universal, and Warner won from Napster ($270 million), Bolt, Kazaa, and other companies (Sony/BMG’s parent company invested in Napster)."
May not, Eliot? You mean there’s some kind of doubt?
Fred Wilhelms is an entertainment attorney down in Nashville, Tennessee, and, "I spent yesterday in the company of outside counsel for all the four majors," he says.
"There were 14 of them there, and several I know who bill at better than $450 an hour, so I suspect that is where a lot of the money has gone."
He goes on >>>
I got a chance to ask them about the apportionment of the settlement money. Most of them professed ignorance, saying their firms had not been involved in the disbursement of the settlement money, but one confirmed that almost all the Warners money has been distributed.
As none of my clients with Warner’s royalty accounts has seen a dime, I suspect that the money has been paid out to artists under current contracts (my clients are all "deep catalog" inhabitants and uniformly management-free), which is why we are now hearing about managers asking questions about where the money is.
I also spoke with the widow of a soul music icon who continues to receive six-figure royalty checks. She got $2,000 from Universal as her late husband’s share of the settlement pot.
Based on what I learned, not much is getting through to the artists.
Fred Wilhelms – p2pnet
[If the corporate music industry had any ethics, Wilhelms would be its 'ethicist-in-chief,' wrote CounterPunch's Dave Marsh. You can contact him at fred.wilhelms @ gmail.com.]
Stay tuned.
Also See:
Listening Post – Artists And Managers Consider Suing Major Labels for Those Napster Millions, February 28, 2008
some kind of doubt – Give us our money! – artists tell Big Music, February 28, 2008
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March 1st, 2008 at 9:22 pm
“saying their firms had not been involved in the disbursement of the settlement money”
Yes they has been invovled. They took most of the money! The parasites Bainwholl and Shitman. took the rest of it.