Opposite Day: Record Labels to Pay Tidy Sum for Stealing Music
Opposite Day: Record Labels to Pay Tidy Sum for Stealing Music
Posted 01/13/2011 at 7:02am
| by Paul Lilly
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What's good for the goose is good for the record labels, who have been ordered to pay Canadian artists $45 million for illegally using copyrighted tracks on compilation CDs, TorrentFreak reports. TorrentFreak says this sort of thing happens more frequently than you think.
"Over the years the labels have made a habit of using songs from a wide variety of artists for compilation CDs without securing the rights," TorrentFreak writes. "They simply use the recording and make note of it on a 'pending list' so they can deal with it later."
It's been going on since the 1980s, TorrentFreak says, with the list of unpaid tracks surpassing 300,000 just in Canada. That didn't sit well with a group of artists and composers waiting to get paid, so they filed a class action suit in 2008. The original suit sought $6 billion in damages from Warner Music, Sony BMG Music, EMI Music, and Universal Music.
In the end, both sides settled on $45 million, which represents "a compromise of disputed claims and is not an admission of liability or wrongdoing by the record labels."
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violian
January 13, 2011 at 12:07pm
Artists themselves are also stealing music, not just the record-companies. The best example is last year's Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom hit song. They stole the song from a local school's mascot song that had been on Youtube years before their album came out. It made headline news.
Ghok
January 13, 2011 at 1:16pm
I wrote a long response to this, but couldn't post it, as it was flagged as spam. Could you at least tell me what I did to trigger it so I don't do it again? Was it because I used copy and paste? Because I kind of like copy and paste. Especially when (for whatever reason) my browser's spell check doesn't work in your site's comment boxes.
ShyLinuxGuy
January 13, 2011 at 11:33am
Unfortunately, the court wouldn't award a $6 billion or $45 billion reward. However, the plaintiff should seek the kind of damages they would against individuals in an RIAA case. $45 million is too low, though. Maybe ~$500 million?
sniggler
January 13, 2011 at 10:24am
It should be $45 BILLION. Not million. To exact revenge on fans of the artists who downloaded a few songs of kaazaa and were forced to pay money they didn't have.
Yet i'll easily spend hundreds on concert tickets to support my artists rather than throwing more money at the fat-cats in suits who abuse their moneymaking pawns (the artists)
Silver925
January 13, 2011 at 10:23am
I wonder if the big record companies would be willing to let some of the people they've sued for outrageous amounts settle for 0.0075% of the initial amount they are claiming in damages?
Rhetorical question. I know, I’m fooling myself.
And now that I think of it, isn’t including a track without permission, but noting it as on a ‘pending list’ very similar to someone illegally downloading something as a way of ‘testing’ if the final product is worth the asking price? (Not condoning the act, just noting the similarity)
praetor_alpha
January 13, 2011 at 10:36am
That's what happens when you have an army of lawyers getting paid similarly outrageous amounts.
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