Music Publishers File Suit To Shut Down LimeWire
After RIAA Success, Publishers Demand $150,000 Per Song
Eight mem
bers of the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) have filed a massive copyright infringement lawsuit against LimeWire. The suit follows a recent action filed by the RIAA that resulted in a
court decision holding LimeWire liable for inducing copyright
infringement leaving and leaving the company just days to show why the
service
should not be shut down. The publishers’ suit is filed as a
related case.
The music publishers filed the lawsuit against LimeWire and its top executives in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. They are asking $150,000 for each song illegally distributed by the company which could bring total damages to hundreds of millions of dollars.
"Pervasive online infringement…
has consequences for everyone in the music chain."
The eight plaintiffs come from the ranks of North America's top
music publishers including companies affiliated with all four major label groups: EMI Music Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., Bug Music, MPL Music Publishing, Peermusic, and The Richmond Organization. Named as defendants are LimeWire LLC, Lime Group LLC, LimeWire CEO Mark Gorton, former COO and CTO Greg Bildson, and M.J.G. LimeWire Family Limited Partnership.
Limewire is fucked! It’s a day of celebration for artists currently getting fucked.
The publishers are the final guarantee that the future of music is all pirate, all criminal, all the time.
But, wallow-T … if creators can’t make a living from what they create … what new music will be available to pirate?
Music publishers represent the forgotten creator – the songwriter. 70% of all music you hear is not written by the artist performing it… It is written by the lowest paid contributor to the creative chain … the songwriter.
Most songwriters don’t perform so nobody is interested in buying their t-shirts. They only get paid when someone purchases a recording of one of their songs or agreements are entered into that pay them in some other fashion.
Great songwriting is a skill possessed by very few. A world of music that didn’t include the contributions of stand alone songwriters would certainly be a vastly smaller musical world than we currently enjoy.
Support the musical ecosystem. Support the music you love by enjoying it through legal outlets – which, in many cases, offer music for free to the consumer while insuring that the creators are paid.
Isn’t that fair? And, won’t doing so produce the most satisfying result for the consumer?
Tonso Tunez’ Public Service Announcement was brought to you by… ?? 🙂
In response, a quote from the most important essay to appear in several years, an essay which the music business needs to memorize:
“The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model.”
—-Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”, spring 2009
My underlying point, which Tonso waves away with boilerplate about legal outlets which are free to the consumer, is that those outlets are doomed, in part because of the publishers’ revenue demands. (See Michael Robertson on this point.)
Music publishers do not represent composers…they steal from composers. The vast majority of their catalogs are songs that should have fallen into public domain years ago, but because they have lawyers and lobbyists, they can get laws passed that are not only Draconian in their intent, but completely self-serving to the leeches that have scammed their way into ownership of that which they did not create. Why should a song copyright last 8 or 9 times longer than a patent? 17 years vs. lifetime of writer plus 75 years…the only reason is so people who add nothing to the creative process can get rich. Walt Disney was long dead when his company funded the effort to extend the Mickey Mouse copyright. Whose intellectual property were they protecting? Who created Mickey? The Walt Disney company? Or Walt Disney the man? Walt is dead, so we’re talking about making his children rich. How about his grandchildren? Great grandkids? Great-great-great grandkids? Where does it stop?
The US Constitution says intellectual property should be protected for a “reasonable” period of time in order to help the creators of that content. We’re way past that. We’re now protecting companies that should have gone the way of the buggy-whip makers. The deck is already stacked against any creative person trying to make it in any of the entertainment businesses. If anything you ever create seems like it’s going to be remotely successful, there are people crawling out of the woodwork with all kinds of ways of attaching themselves to your creation. We all know this is true. Now the major record companies, agents, managers, publishers, distributors…all the people that were able to cut themselves pieces of YOUR creation…they are all looking more like the Titanic every day. Allow me to throw them an anchor as they sink.