p2pnet - rss feed: UK watchdog attacks Big Music
p2p news / p2pnet:- “Criminal sanctions for infringing copyright holders’ rights must be applied only to organised crime - not to individual citizens making use of new technologies.”
This statement came from Jill Johnstone, director of policy for Britain’s National Consumer Council (NCC) and quoted in The Scotsman.
The NCC was attacking Big Music’s BPI (British Phonographic Industry) for its “heavy-handed” use of court action against people who share music with each other online. It wants the labels to, “work on affordable ways of allowing fans to trade songs without being hauled before the courts,” says the story.
The BPI has muscled “compensation settlements” ranging from £2,500 (more than $4,400) to £6,500 (about $11,445) from 60 Britons. In the US, ’settlements’ are usually in the $3,500 range.
The extortions are part of a blackly cynical and massively orchestrated international scheme to use legal systems to cow general populations into buying product made by the UK’s EMI Group, France’s Vivendi Universal, America’s Warner Music and Sony BMG from Japan and Germany.
Together they comprise the Big Four record label cartel. In America, the Big Four are currently suing a schoolgirl for alleged copyright infringement.
“There needs to be balance between the rights of the artist and those of the consumer,” The Scotsman has the NCC’s director of policy, Jill Johnstone, saying.
“At the moment the balance is all on the side of the record companies.”
Ms Johnstone, one of 300 delegates attending a London conference on the creative economy, also warned that a tightening of the law on intellectual property being considered by Brussels could make the situation of UK surfers “even worse”.
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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win
- Mohandas Gandhi
See:-
The Scotsman - Watchdog attacks music industry for tough stance on net pirates , October 8, 2005
suing a schoolgirl - Big Music wants Britanny Chan, October 05, 2005
They depend on us. We don’t depend on them. Bug the hell out of your local congress person, MP, or whoever is supposed to represent you, wherever you are. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance.
October 9th, 2005 at 11:55 am
My interpretation:
The politicians have turned against the people that put them there.
The legal system has turned against the people that own the system
The entertaiment industry has turned against its customers.
Music publishers and the songwriter associations have turned against songwriters.
The press has turned agaisnt the people that buy their products.
Dealers of all kinds of products and services have turned against their customers.
Public employees have turned agaisnt the people they work for.
Soldiers have turned against people they have never met.
All for MONEY…. THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com
October 9th, 2005 at 11:56 am
Like I’ve said before, people need to STOP buying ALL CD’s and DVD’s and movie tickets for one year.
Just rent them or borrow from friends.
This crap will stop overnight.
October 9th, 2005 at 10:36 pm
Buy pre-used products, borrow from libraries etc. Let’s do everything we can to take as much money as possible away from these greedy, little creatures! Treat them with the contempt they deserve.
If you ask your local library for a disk they are duty bound to supply it (at least here in Wales, U.K.), so go and borrow as many as you can - and whether you copy them and share them among as many people as you can isn’t up to me.
October 10th, 2005 at 4:04 am
Unfortunately, Ms. Johnstone seems to have been taken in a bit by the Big Four’s propaganda. She talks about striking a balance between consumers and the artists rights. The corporations that comprise the Big Music Cartel, through mergers, acquisitions, spin-offs, piss-offs, and other forms of splintering, have basically been reduced to nothing but distributors. Virtually all of the ‘creative’ work is performed by individuals, smaller companies, and specialized ’boutique houses’ to get something in the can for the big Four to peddle. They still have the traditional ‘departments’ (like A&R), but these are principally staffed by administrators, accountants, and lawyers to manage the contracts of the people and companies who actually perform these tasks.
The Big Four (and their predecessors) having been shortchanging and treating the creative people rather shabbily over the past several years, in addition to their new strategy of extorting money from their consumer base. It’s really the Big Four against, uh, well, everyone else.
Since they only really know distribution, if there were some way to bypass them to get the music in the hands of consumers, it would make everyone’s life much more pleasant. It would have to be easy to access, preferably right in the home, easy to set up and use, be able to access a large number of sources that might be significantly geographically dispersed, have a common set of mechanisms for efficient communications, and be supported by organizations versed in keeping things going 24/7/365 staffed with highly trained people, yet the users don’t really have to know ALL (or even much at all) of the details in order to use it to get what they wish……
Oops, I think I just described the internet. The threat to the entertainment industry is the internet itself. It’s a much larger and considerably more efficient distribution network than the ones the cartels have set up. If you can’t prevail over a rival by competing fairly either you fold your tent, or……. (I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider the possibilities.)
–TG