FW: Record industry plays both sides

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

Subject: Record industry plays both sides

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,42426,00.html
 
Record companies aren't the only ones that hold copyright on music
recordings. Music publishers, who represent lyricists and composers, do
too -- owning the rights to the piece of music itself. For every copy a
record company distributes, the publisher gets a small cut. That's how the
people who write the songs get paid.

The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization and the Songwriters Guild of
America, along with other artists and publishers, sued Universal's new
website, called the Farmclub Online <http://www.farmclub.com/> , for
letting users download music without paying royalties to the people who
wrote and published the songs.

The very first line of the suit
<http://www.nmpa.org/pr/universal_complaint.pdf> makes clear that the
irony of the situation had not slipped away unnoticed. "UMG Recordings has
decided to engage in the very same infringing activities that UMG itself
-- in a recent and highly publicized lawsuit -- successfully challenged in
this court.

Negotiations broke down over how the spoils would be split once the
industry finally figured out how to turn MP3 files into cash. The NMPA and
the Recording Industry Association of America ( RIAA
<http://www.riaa.com/> ) filed separate petitions to the U.S. Copyright
office, asking the government to help settle the matter.

In its petition
<http://www.techlawjournal.com/agencies/loc/riaa/20001129.asp> to the
copyright office <http://www.copyright.gov/copyright/> , the RIAA made
some arguments that could have come straight out of MP3.com's defense
playbook.

"To be compelling to consumers ... a service must offer tens or hundreds
of thousands of songs, in which rights may be owned by hundreds or
thousands of publishers," the petition said. "No service provider is eager
to embark on individual negotiations with all those publishers unless it
is necessary."

Bill Goldsmith, Web director of KPIG radio -- the very first radio station
to simulcast on the Net -- was less restrained in his criticism. "I think
the RIAA is a bunch of greedy, shortsighted idiots," he said.

Goldsmith thinks the industry's take-no-prisoners strategy may backfire.
"They're pissing off the artists," he said. "If they piss off online radio
too, what's to prevent a system that doesn't involve the recording
industry at all? They're encouraging the development of an alternative
relationship between producers and radio stations."