Like a Virgin?
p2p news view / p2pnet: Free filesharing is killing the music industry, say the experts in the industry. But while they`re chasing, arresting, and suing innocent people for sharing legally purchased product, the real pirates are making a mint. And some of them are sailing under false flags.
The newest pirate is Virgin Records, which was recently found guilty by the Paris Tribunal of Commerce, of music piracy. They admittedly downloading a Madonna song, Hung Up, from a France Télécom website which had exclusive rights to distribute the song for a week, cracked the DRM, and resold it on their own website.
“This is an amazing case of simple piracy”, Hervé Payan, senior vice president for content partnership and service at France Télécom, said.
According to the International Herald Tribune, Virgin said it had the interests of digital music consumers at heart when it broke the exclusive arrangement.
Since when does a multinational corporation have the interests of digital music consumers at heart? Their main concern has always been firmly rooted in profiteering and stuffing shareholders` pockets at any price including theft and piracy. The consumer has nothing to do with what motivates the entertainment industry.
The company was ordered to pay â¬600,000, or $754,000, in damages. No one went to prison. No one lost his or her home or job. And the company was not forced into bankruptcy or to close down.
In stark contrast, any private person who’s caught sharing music gets a subpoena and stands an excellent chance of having their homes searched and computers confiscated (including personal and private documents and data having nothing to do with the subpoena).
In short, any one of the 19,000+ people who have been victimized by the music cartels, pilloried and found guilty of piracy in the lamescream press faces the prospect of bankruptcy, total financial ruin, and a possible prison sentence if they don`t agree to pay an out of court settlement, which would have the same financial effect.
But Virgin justifies its actions this way: “We have always been ahead of the others posing questions that look to the interests of consumers,” according to Laurent Fiscal, a director of the store.
If that were used as the defence by any of the 19,000 Big Music victims currently being sued, no doubt each and every one of them would be forced to sell their homes and possessions to help pay their court costs and subsequent fines, no matter that nothing was stolen and no one made a profit (as real pirates like Virgin did).
And if Big Music had anything to say about it, they`d also be put into stocks, or drawn and quartered in the town square.
Pirates like Virgin steal and profit from their criminal activities.
Filesharers don`t steal a thing and make no profit whatsoever.
That`s a big difference.
catflap – p2pnet
Digg this.
p2pnet newsfeeds for your site.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss
Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
