Law professor fires back at song-swapping lawsuits
November 17, 2008 By RODRIQUE NGOWI , Associated Press Writer(AP) -- The music industry's courtroom campaign against people who share songs online is coming under counterattack. A Harvard Law School professor has launched a constitutional assault against a federal copyright law at the heart of the industry's aggressive strategy, which has wrung payments from thousands of song-swappers since 2003.
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I might be a LOT more sympathetic to the music "industry" if they actually did return ANY revenu to artists. Last few interviews I've seen show that artists earn nothing, nada, zero, ziltch from "industry" CD sales. All their earnings come from concert ticket sales, and they have to organize the concerts themselves with very little help from the "industry".
Its time for a new music industry paradigm. Companies who speculated heavily in the future value of music copyrights need to be told they simply screwed up. Then artists can be freed to figure out creative new ways to market their music using the very powerful and fully adequate functions of the internet.
Anyone know offhand how much of the $.99 an artist gets from a sale on ITunes?
On the one hand, it's probably significantly better than what they'd get from a CD sale; on the other hand, people tend to buy singles a lot more often on ITunes rather than the whole CD including filler songs; on the third hand (yeah, my mother is my sister :-)) people who wouldn't buy CDs because they're too expensive may buy a single song that they like.
Any stats on this?
Boycotts won't work because the recording industry will only point at it and say "SEE!!! we're loosing tons of profit because of all of this piracy! Look at how many fewer sales we are getting!"
I don't quite agree. If you put a lot of effort into what you create, I feel you should be fairly compensated for the value that your creation provides.
How much real "effort" do the record companies put into "creating" music??? I DO think artists should be compensated directly, right into their bank accounts...and the technology already exists!