Guns ‘N Roses, the RIAA and Chinese Democracy
p2pnet news view | RIAA News:- FBI agents raided the Los Angeles home of 27-year-old blogger Kevin Cogill and arrested him.
Cogill’s crime? He uploaded nine unreleased tracks from the upcoming Guns N’ Roses album to his blog.
The album is titled “Chinese Democracy.” Now there’s an oxymoron for you.
Cogill admits to posting the files last June so GnR nuts could stream them off his music blog.
He took them down when he received a cease and desist letter, and cooperated with the FBI in its investigation. According to Wikipedia (admittedly not the most reliable source) six of the songs had been made available in some other form and three were new.
Now Cogill’s looking at three years in the pokey and fines of $250,000, plus whatever damages the band might choose to pursue.
The legal argument here is that posting files for free kills legitimate sales of the music. (And Lord knows GnR must need the money – they’ve only sold 90 million records during their career.) But Cogill didn’t make the files available for downloading. He streamed them to a player on his blog.
If someone can explain to me how streaming music cuts out legitimate sales, I’d like to hear it. Don’t we have an invention that does something very similar called – radio? Hasn’t that been the prime marketing vehicle for the recording industry for the past 50 years?
There’s only one rational explanation for a deed so trivial to get this kind of attention.
Someone with some serious juice is leaning on the Feds.
Now I mean no disrepect to the hardworking guys and gals in blue suits and buzz cuts. They have a tough job and they seem to do it pretty well. In fact, the FBI has more on their plates than they can possibly handle. So to send five agents to arrest a scruffy blogger for streaming a handful of MP3s almost certainly means somebody pulled some strings.
Let me posit this hypothetical scenario »»»
Recording industry mogul hears about the scruffy blogger, goes postal, calls his highly paid lobbying firm on K Street.
Lobbyist contacts Senator on the Judiciary Committee – say, someone with a history of pushing RIAA-friendly legislation in return for major campaign donations (Orrin Hatch, your Blackberry is buzzing).
Senator calls the FBI director, who calls the director of the LA office. PR firm for recording mogul selectively leaks story of arrest to a handful of news outlets. Next thing you know Cogill is in cuffs and everybody has a nice juicy story to run on how the Internet is destroying the recording industry.
(News flash: The recording industry is destroying the recording industry. Can’t happen too soon, in my opinion.)
This truly is Chinese Democracy in action.
The ruling party makes the rules and breaks them when they feel like it. They selectively prosecute those they perceive as enemies, while failing to act on far more serious breaches of the public trust by their allies. I don’t think I need to list the many examples we’ve seen over the last eight years.
There are lots of ways this situation could have played out short of bringing in the Feds.
Guns N’ Roses management could have accepted Cogill’s decision to take down the files and been done.
They could have asked him for a royalty fee equivalent to what radio stations pay and continued to stream the music to fans hungry for more GnR.
Or maybe they should have just thanked Cogill for putting the band back in the spotlight, 13 years after they last staggered out of a recording studio.
(This post originally appeared on Infoworld’s Notes From the Field blog.)
Dan Tynan – Tynan on Technology (beta)
[Tynan slugs his personal blog 'Tech talk without the usual BS.' He's been writing and editing stories about technology and its discontents for more than 20 years. During that time he's been an editor in chief and an executive editor for national magazines, written for more than 50 publications, and taken home a closet full of awards. He's also the author of Computer Privacy Annoyances, soon to be a major motion picture starring Ashton Kutcher.]
August 29th, 2008 at 6:30 am
All this speculation, while it makes for hyperbolic reading, is essentially beside the point. The artist or creator has a basic human right to the control of their creations. The release (or not) the sale, the duplication, the distribution. These creator rights are inherent, and copyright law basically codifies these fundamental human rights. These rights can be legally transferred or sold outright and often are. As a rights holder, you have and enjoy certain influences and uses that a non-rights holder does not legally or ethically enjoy. If you want to see the laws changed, lobby to change them, just as the industry does. If “the people” care enough and can bring down a standing American president as we did in 1973, we can influence copyright law, too. But every instance of trespass, legal, moral, ethical, should and will be identified and prosecuted and punished. Tanya got her legal fees just as she should. Jammie gets her second chance. This door swings both ways. Work within the law or be treated as someone who elects to work outside the law with all the potential consequences. We all have choices to make and Cogill mades his. It was illegal and he’ll be held accountable. Good luck in Vancouver today, Jon.
August 29th, 2008 at 7:02 am
“We all have choices to make and Cogill mades his. It was illegal and heâll be held accountable.”
The problem is that the penalty is completely out of proportion to the “harm” that was caused. There are more serious crimes that can cause much greater financial harm and/or even physical harm, but which will earn lower fines and/or shorter jail sentences than copyright infringement. Copyright infringement has been elevated to some kind of monumental crime against humanity, when all it is, is a civil crime (if that’s even the word) against a corporation.
Get busted for selling crack on the street corner and you’ll be out sooner than if you sold a pre-release copy of a movie. Which is more harmful to society?
August 29th, 2008 at 7:11 am
hey i got an idea,
why not make music cause you enjoy it and share it with others FREE.
Then we can have tons a tunes and we dont need to worry about gettting sued by losers and greedy bastards that should not exist and are overpaid bums largely.
August 29th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
After the last time I saw Guns ‘N Roses (they showed up 3 3/4 hours late for their show), I could give a crap. Fuck Axl Rose, he hasn’t been relevant since “Use Your Illusion”!
August 29th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Yeesh. I can understand cancelling a show at the last minute altogether, but starting 3:45 hours late?????!!!!! I guess Axl’s stage presence is as reliable as his ability to release records.
August 29th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
i was there at a maiden concert when after there set they trashed backstage ( got themselves kicked off the tour for it )
yup great bunch a idiots
almost as bad as when dave mustane of megadeth came out in toronto and said “hello montreal” played one song broke his guitar and hten left
August 29th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
time to take back our world from these greedy bastards.
watch the next canuck election and hopefully we get a lot of under 35 yr olds out to change canada’s future.
August 29th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
We don’t need roses, we need guns and lawyers to defend ourselves against our enemies. And government together with the lobbiles is among our enemies.
August 29th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
The last time I saw GNR was when they played in Vancouver….Oh wait THEY didnt SHOW UP!!!
One of the songs that was on that site was downloaded by a Vancouver radio station and played on the radio.
And just recently one of the other radio stations downloaded the new leaked track of TI and even said they would probably get some C&D order but until then they’ll play dumb and play the song.
And any song that is streamed online can be downloaded. Even songs on Myspace and artists own websites. There are several addons with firefox that lets you do this.
August 30th, 2008 at 4:46 am
Sam:
First, no. Historically, there WAS no such thing as “copyright” in the conventional sense of the term. That began with something called the “Statute of Anne” in England. Ironically enough, it was a compromise between the printing-houses of the time (which had previously been granted perpetual monopoly over printing “rights” even to works whose authors were long dead), and the general public.
The idea that State-backed monopoly power is a “fundamental human right” is actually horrifying. Look into copyright “law” some time, and you’ll notice that the DISTRIBUTORS of “content” have historically had far more control than the actual creators of said content — Just one example, is John Fogerty (Of CReedence Clearwater Revival fame) being barred from “legally” performing HIS OWN SONGS because he changed labels.
“We, the people” don’t have multi-million dollar lobbyists, and “we” did NOT change copyright “law”: legislators did.
Honestly, if you’re really interested in the “fundamental human rights” of creators to the control of their own works, then you should regard the RIAA-member record labels as the worst offenders against it in history.
And, just to head off whatever specious “objections” you might have: I am a musician myself. As such, I genuinely resent a system which penalizes REAL ARTISTS — people who actually give a damn about what they’re doing — in favor of shit like Amy Winehouse; a system which screws people out of their “fundamental human right to control their own works” by classifying them as a “work for hire”; a system which has routinely failed to actually come through on delivering royalty payments to vast numbers of their own major label “workforce”.
Look back at the original version of Copyright the Founding Fathers created: 11 years. NO “life plus infinity” bullshit.
To be honest, I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that the only way out of this bullshit is to release my stuff gratis online with a little note to a paypal account or something, so that people can throw me a few bucks if they want to. Barring “Major Label” support, that’s about the only way (other than woefully infrequent gigs) that it’ll ever actually be heard.
Trust me, Sam — I used to be just like you, parroting off all of the same rhetoric — but then I actually looked at what the “copyright” regime had done — served as just another way to screw people over. Do you have a VCR or TIVO? If so, according to a former RIAA spokes-drone, you’re the equivalent of the “Boston Strangler”.
Unless you’ve NEVER used blank video-tape to tape something off air, you very literally have NOTHING to say, here.
This is, after all, an “all or nothing” deal: if you’ve violated “fundamental human rights”, then ‘fess up to it, man!
Why am I even bothering?
August 30th, 2008 at 7:10 am
@Henry Ermich
…in favor of shit like Amy Winehouse…
Nicely said, I can’t stand her either. A real product of the “Cult of Celebrity”. Yuck.
The rest of your post is solid gold too. Dunno if you’ve seen Sam’s posts from a few months back, but he seems like just another troll to me; perhaps a *real* RIAA shill, rather than someone mucking about? He’s been boo’d off the stage many times here.
August 30th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
@Henry Ermich:
First off, thumbs up to a well thought out response to
Sam I Am’s trolling. I think it effectively silenced him
(or maybe not – trying to show others of his ilk just
how wrong they are is like talking to a brick wall.)
Second, it was former MPAA president Jack Valenti
who said that owning a VCR was the equivalent of
the Boston Strangler.
September 2nd, 2008 at 5:52 am
Not only did he admit to doing it, he did it two times, in writing, and signed a confession for the FBI !!
you can read the court complaint and other documents here: http://www.piracyisacrime.org/In-The-Courtroom/updated-information-about-guns-n-roses-leak.html
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Chris, you are missing the point, which is the punishment for this far out weighs the crime, which is typical in America where crimes against corporations tent to carry far heavier penalties than crimes against individuals.
I would very much doubt G & R got on the phone screaming to the FBI, as a previous poster pointed out, it is much more likely the RIAA, through lobbyists, got the FBI on the case.
I would conclude by saying, whether Cogill is guilty or not, the FBI has far more serious cases to work on than copyright BS.
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Several points:
1. let this be a lesson to you all, use an anonymizing proxy and a Tor (Vidalia) client to browse the web. It slows you down a little, yet provides almost perfect anonymity. Had he done this it would have been impossible to prove he was the uploader, they would have had just circumstantial evidence, although this is a âcivilâ case (the FBI intraction notwithstanding).
2. is GnR REALLY that worried of much lower-quality streaming of their cr@p (imho) being released that it might impact sales of their BIG4 CDâs? Yes, one could, I suppose, reconvert the stream and burn it to a CD to listen to in their car, but the quality loss is very noticeable (due to lack of automatic gain on the reprocessing among other things) and real fans are just going to go buy the CD or get burned copies from friendsâ¦there would have been NO loss in sales.