Pink Floyd sues EMI
p2pnet view Music:- More trouble for battered Big 4 organised music gang member EMI.
The UK company which, together with Vivendi Universal, Warner Music and Sony Music, has been trying to gain control of online music distribution by suing its own customers, claims everything in the garden is lovely, despite a crushing debt load and an alarming turnover of senior executives.
Now it’s being sued by one of its most famous and consistent earners, Pink Floyd, a member of the anti-P2P, anti-file sharing Featured Artists Coalition.
The surviving members are taking EMI to court over payment of online royalties and the marketing of their music, says the BBC, going on, “The group, signed to EMI since 1967, are disputing the way payments for their digital sales are calculated.
“They are also seeking a ruling on whether the label can sell individual tracks from their original albums.”
Within a few years of the contract being signed “both parties were faced with a whole new world of potential exploitation”, the Financial Times has Pink Floyd lawyer Robert Howe saying, continuing >>>
The legal dispute is over the calculation of royalties for online sales, which were in their infancy in 1998 but now represent more than a quarter of record company revenues, with a $4.2bn (£2.8bn) share of all sales .
Pink Floyd is also seeking a court ruling that EMI should not be allowed to “unbundle” songs from within albums and sell them individually online, which the band says EMI is already doing.
Pink Floyd is among bands which, through the FAC, are supporting the entertainment cartel Three Strikes business plan which seems set to become law in the UK.
A decision on the EMI case is expected tomorrow.
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
alarming turnover – EMI revolving door: Leoni-Sceti out. Allen in., March 10, 2010
BBC – Pink Floyd take EMI to court, March 9, 2010
Financial Times – Pink Floyd sues EMI in dispute over online sales and revenues, March 10, 2010
Three Strikes business plan – Dear Ed O’Brien …, January 23, 2010
become law in the UK – Corporate 3 Strikes scam to be law in UK, March 8, 2010
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They are also seeking a ruling on whether the label can sell individual tracks from their original albums.
March 10th, 2010 at 10:51 am
“Pink Floyd, a member of the anti-P2P, anti-file sharing Featured Artists Coalition.”
Looks like Pink Floyd are just another brick in the Wall.
March 10th, 2010 at 12:59 pm
It’s a double edge sword.
On the one hand, I sincerely hope they get any and all royalties due them, but insisting that songs CAN’T be
sold individually is just fucking stupid. The fans should have the freedom to choose that whole album or
just the one or two songs they like. Just because I only like to listen to ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and ‘Animals’
complete and in sequence doesn’t mean everyone else has to. Taking choice away from any fan is never a
good idea.But, I’ve come to expect stupidity from FAC members.
March 10th, 2010 at 2:25 pm
[Queues up Dark Side of the Moon]
(Everybody…)
“Mo-ney!
So they say
Is the root of all e-vil
toooo-day!”
While I agree the *fans* should have the choice, this issue isn’t about what might be good for fans. It’s about the band’s need to enforce the conditions of their contracts with EMI themselves, and I do think Floyd has a pretty good case here.
Their contracts clearly defined the *album* as the “product”, and stipulated that distributing single tracks was not an option. And, since it was never agreed that “online distribution” have any different stipulations, EMI’s excuse about the contract “not being valid over the Internet” is just grasping at straws. Unfortunately, the Internet broke copyright and broke that style of contract for them along with it.
The recording industry, in its desperate rush to counter the filesharing effect, and replace “pirate tracks” with “legal tracks”, completely overlooked contracts like Pink Floyd’s in the process, most likely deliberately. Because of the contracts EMI held, they’re guilty, in these cases, of breach of contract, in addition to the very infringement they were rattlin’ their gums about the filesharers committing.
Way to go, EMI!
Good work!
(Work that may actually benefit the fans, when you think of it!)
March 10th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
I love it. Money being sucked out of EMI could only mean the bucks being spent on booze rather than being spent starting lawsuits against more online customers.
March 10th, 2010 at 4:32 pm
“Pink Floyd is among bands which, through the FAC, are supporting the entertainment cartel Three Strikes business plan which seems set to become law in the UK”
Pink Floyd can keep their crap for themselves. This is crappy music anyway.
Do they really think we are impressed by these ridiculous electronic noises?
Sorry.
March 10th, 2010 at 7:16 pm
It’s not like they can tour anymore. They need to make money off their legacy somehow.
March 10th, 2010 at 7:49 pm
It’s not that Pink Floyd is necessarily against sales of singles. More likely it’s that they’re wanting to negotiate a better contract over the sales of their music as digital downloads (something not covered by their original contract).
We need to keep in mind that even successful artists normally only get pennies on the dollar on every sale – with the record label keeping most of the rest. That formula might have made sense in the early days when a label bore substantial costs promoting unknown artists, but now it’s been turned into a gravy train, as it costs next to nothing to put 40-year-old songs online. PF should demand at least a 50/50 split of digital downloads.
Then there’s the other glaring issue: whether 40-year-old songs should even be still under copyright instead of public domain.
March 11th, 2010 at 2:35 am
Where’d my post go?????
March 11th, 2010 at 9:04 am
@ Henry:
I had a huge flood of spams waiting for me this morning. Did you have a link or links in it? If so it may have gone with the spam. If so, sorry about that. Please send it to me in an email, or re-post it.
Cheers!
March 11th, 2010 at 2:48 pm
@Jon:
More Grand piano stuff?
@DA:
“On the one hand, I sincerely hope they get any and all royalties due them, but insisting that songs CAN’T be
sold individually is just fucking stupid.”
Barring back-door deals scored by multinational corporate megaliths (like EMI), some Pink Floyd stuff could have entered the public domain by now. They’re only “entitled” to royalties 40 years later because their corporate overlords BOUGHT/BRIBED their way into absurd, socially-damaging copyright lengths.
Even assuming that copy”right” privileges are “needed” at all (which is an extremely shaky claim in itself), I have *yet* to ever see a coherent explanation of why monopolists “should” retain such privileges for decades (let alone 75 years past their own death).
Not only are Pink Floyd hopelessly demonstrating themselves to be totally ignorant of the original justification (and limits) of copyright law, AND totally apathetic to what their precious monopoly privileges have done to the Public Domain, but the fact that it’s taken them *this* long to realize that their corporate overlords are/were out to screw them over…..well, how out of touch to you have to be?
Pampered celebrity has-beens piss me off — ESPECIALLY when they are members of an organization (FAC), that votes for Draconian, evil, corporate-backed bullshit.
Don’t get me wrong: they *did* do some great music, but that doens’t change the fact that they’re total sell-outs, at this point in time.
March 11th, 2010 at 4:16 pm
@Henry:
I think you’ve attributed Dredd’s words to me.
)
(@Dredd: Not that I have a problem with those words.
While I agree with everything you’ve said, I still think it’s kind of nice to see the real criminals under fire, subjected to their own self-created legal terms.
I was a big fan of Floyd as well, but they are demonstrating themselves to be classic “sell-outs” .
[queues "Have a Cigar"]
“Come in here dear boy, have a ci-gar…”
March 11th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
“The wall” was cool. “Dark side of the moon” was cool, but by far, the best Pink Floyd stuff I’ve ever heard was their early stuff with Syd Barrett. Yeah, he weirded out later, the version of “interstellar overdrive” from that 1966/67 live thing, was sheer genius.
(Of course, that was before they started to believe the “celebrity” bullshit — it’s really ironic when (formerly) “counterculture”/”Anti-Establishment” types turn into corporate lapdogs. Ironic, and insulting to boot.
They build up their fanbase portraying themselves one way/projecting a particular social/political/cultural vision (in particular with a lot of these groups — suspicion of the “power-elite” in government/corporations). Then — when they’re safely ensconced behind the barricades of power and privilege, they turn to those same corporate/government power-elites, in an effort to have social or technological changes stopped, just so they can be *a little bit wealither*, when they *already* enjoy a lifestyle the vast majority of humankind has never even known — including the vast hordes of fans/consumers/victims of “laws” like 3-strikes and such.
That’s one reason that I respected the Grateful Dead — not neccesarily a fan of their music as much as I like other groups, but they never really succumbed to the “celebrity douchebag” syndrome, at least not to the extent that a lot of other artists/groups have. (They remained “taper-friendly”, and even now there’s a (relatively) usable “Grateful dead audio archive” over on Archive.org — it sucks that they have a lot of the better stuff as “streaming” only, although anybody with the right skill-set can get around that easily enough).
The really interesting thing about the Dead, is the sub-culture that grew up around their shows.
Ah well, I’m rambling.
(Probably my sinus meds kicked in or something)
March 12th, 2010 at 12:36 am
Oh those were the days listening to pink floyd getting drunk smoking weed and getting stoned out of my mind on lsd listening to dark side of the moon animals and Wish you were here.
Syd Barrett and richard Wright passed away and David Gilmore nick mason and Roger walters are the only ones left.
Come in here, Dear boy, have a cigar.
You’re gonna go far,
You’re gonna fly high,
You’re never gonna die,
You’re gonna make it, if you try;
They’re gonna love you.
Well I’ve always had a deep respect,
And I mean that most sincere.
The band is just fantastic,
that is really what I think.
Oh by the way, which one’s Pink?
And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
We call it Riding the Gravy Train.
We’re just knocked out.
We heard about the sell-out.
You gotta get an album out.
You owe it to the people.
We’re so happy we can hardly count.
Everybody else is just green,
Have you seen the chart?
It’s a hell of a start,
It could be made into a monster
If we all pull together as a team.
And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
We call it Riding the Gravy Train.
March 12th, 2010 at 5:32 am
Riding the Gravy Train
Indeed
March 14th, 2010 at 12:26 pm
“Riding the Gravy Train” has been the norm for far too long, now it’s it’s time to “Tear Down the Wall”, the middlemen, who have sucked the life (and “Money”) out of everyone for countless years. The fact that Pink Floyd is still bending over and taking MOST of the major label abuses, and supporting the joke of a FAC, makes them really a billboard example of everything that is wrong with copyright.
If copyright had remained, as intended, everything except the post-Waters Pink Floyd, would be public domain now, and Pink Floyd might have just done another tour since 1994 instead of just sitting back doing nothing collecting those royalties all these years. I fail to see how extended copyright encourages the capable to offer more to society and to “promote the progress of science and useful arts”. Now instead, bands (ie: AC/DC, Metallica, KISS. etc.) can just sit on their collective asses for 5-10 years and collect a paycheck for doing nothing. So my question is this, since it’s impossible to delve deeper without getting political… in the conservative’s eyes… how is it acceptable to extend copyright welfare into eternity while insisting that unemployment extensions for those who have put their blood, sweat, and tears into their job for 40 hrs or more a week should be denied? And called lazy when we are in the worst financial crisis that probably the majority of the world population has ever witnessed in their lifetime?
“In 1834 the Supreme Court ruled in Wheaton v. Peters, a case similar to the British Donaldson v Beckett of 1774, that although the author of an unpublished work had a common law right to control the first publication of that work, the author did not have a common law right to control reproduction following the first publication of the work.” (Source: Wiki)
This reasoning, applied today, would make file-sharing of all types LEGAL!!