[BC] ASCAP and BMI and Rights

[David Lawrence]

On 1/26/06 1:21 PM, one WFIFeng at aol.com <WFIFeng at aol.com> wrote:

 > When they (The Music mafia) can sue a little 2-seater, 1-man barbershop for
 > $50,000 because he had a *radio* playing in his tiny shop, that's
 > strong-arming, Mafia-esque behavior.

I've looked at the ASCAP, BMI and RIAA litigation histories, and I see
nothing, nor does Google find anything, that relates to such a case. Could
you show me where I can find the details?

 > When a radio station is already paying
 > exhorbitant
 > fees to advertise the music companies' product, and then they want to make a
 > local shop pay AGAIN for playing that radio station, yes, I see that as
 > corrupt.

Exhorbitant is a relative term, and is hyperbole. Radio stations gather an
audience with that music, and they should and are charged for it.

If the local merchant then uses the radio station's presentation of that
music to enhance their environment, the radio station gains no profit from
that. The store does. The store pays.

Do you resent paying the rights companies for your Christian music? Or don't
you pay? Or don't you play any copyrighted Christian music?

 > (Double-billing for the same service.)

Indeed, it is not.

And now we get to my expertise, so let's dance:

? When they (The Music Mafia) can sue 12
 > year old kids and 88 year old grandmas out of house and home, I see that as
 > "Guido"-esque tactics. ("Guido" not meant to denigrate Italian-Americans, it
 > is
 > symbolic of the Mafia "hitman" who is sent to make you the "offer you CAN'T
 > refuse.")

More hyperbole and urban legend and you should stop using it as examples and
change your thinking, plain and simple. Here are the facts, Willie:

No one has been sued out of house and home by ASCAP, BMI, SESAC or, now that
you've mixed them up into this, the RIAA - the amounts sued for, and
sometimes settled for, have all been in the $1000 - $4000 range, unless
they've been running little p2p servers, and then the highest amount sued
for was $22,000.

What you certainly can point to are errors made by ISPs (not, so far, by the
RIAA) in noting which of their customers was using a particular IP address
via DHCP at a particular time (the grandma, Sarah Seabury Ward, in the
Boston area, is an example of this mistake) when responding to an RIAA
subpoena.

And the 12-year old little girl of which you speak? Funny thing about little
New Yorker Brianna LaHara...turns out that Brianna's mother, whose credit
was in the toilet, happened to have used the little girl's name to
fraudulently obtain cable service, including high speed cable Internet
access, from which the piracy occurred. That's why the bill was in the
little girl's name and that's why the subpoena was in her name as well. The
RIAA didn't know she was 12 years old, not that it should have mattered.

Oh, and by the way, the little girl was actually pirating to the tune of 14
gigs of open share on her hard drive at the time of seizure, and admitted to
downloading over 1,000 files. Brianna's mother grabbed and paid for a copy
of Kazaa for her, then told her daughter that since she'd paid for it, she
could copy all the music she wanted. She paid, or more accurately, her
mother paid, $2000 to settle the case, a far cry from the statutory penalty,
which is $150,000 per SONG.

And Brianna apologized publicly for her actions. Sounds about right to me,
and I feel no sorrow for Brianna or her mother. Her mother says that Brianna
is an honors student. In that case, she should have known better. Does it
matter when someone steals how old they are? Does the commandment say "Thou
shalt not steal, unless you're a cute little girl from New York?"

We have a tendency in this country to want to denigrate large corporations
once they get successful, decide to defend their intellectual property, and
myriad other reasons. In these cases (the unknown barber shop
notwithstanding), you're wasting your angst on things that don't deserve it.

And to simply rail against the organizations that defend those rights on
behalf of the content creators is like getting angry at a minister that
simply is spreading the good word.

And here's today's fun fact: there's not a single character named Guido in
any of the Godfather movies, from the first of which the phrase "make him an
offer he can't refuse" comes. Guido, however, is used as often as "wop" or
"dago" when denigrating Italians. Given that you live in the Bridgeport/New
Haven corridor, it might behoove you to rethink the use of that word.

David