Hoist by their own petard (I hope)

The recording industry has long been pushing for incredibly punitive awards against people who download music. Well, now there is a lawsuit by the artists against the music companies that has the potential to damage their earnings severely. How severely? Try between $50 million and $6 billion severely.

Janis Ian wrote a widely-read article about song downloads in 2002. She was, and is, in favor of them. You should read the whole article; it’s very informative and insightful. Her comments with respect to her personal experiences with the record companies are pertinent to the lawsuit’s claims, to wit:

Again, from personal experience: in 37 years as a recording artist, I’ve created 25+ albums for major labels, and I’ve never once received a royalty check that didn’t show I owed them money.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Via The Devil’s Kitchen.

One Response to “Hoist by their own petard (I hope)”

  1. wheels says:

    Actually, no. I wrote about it on my prior website, parts of which are still available on archive.org, but even then, I was mostly pointing to articles that others had written.

    It’s a subject that could easily make a very long post, or a series of them, because the record companies have been so egregious in their misbehavior. Lawsuits, legislation and lobbying, copyright issues, contract issues (I remember reading one wonderfully-informative article back then that explained just how the contracts and accounting were set up so that most acts ended up owing money no matter how well their music sold. I’d have linked it in this article, but I didn’t really want to spend the time trying to find it again), and so on. I have one CD that I’ve only played in the car, because it insisted on installing software on my PC before I could play the music – I don’t know if it’s the infamous Sony rootkit or something else. Maybe I should track ithe CD down again now that I use Macs instead of PCs.