Herschel writes: : At the root of all this stuff is the idea of intellectual property rights. : : For a very long time the recording industry has been posing as the music : industry. When cassette tapes were introduced, the recording industry got a : cut from all sales because they said it was costing musicians money. : Musicians never saw a cent of it. here here! That was one of the reason the Artist Formerly Known As Prince changed his name (the media knew these, but they chose to poke fun at the name change) for Warner wouldn't let him release his music at the rate he disired (they wanted to keep profits high) - his name change was a protest AND a way for him to get music out. Quoted, he said "The first step I have taken towards the ultimate goal of emancipation from the chains that bind me to Warner Bros. was to change my name from Prince to [the Love Symbol]. Prince is the name that my Mother gave me at birth. Warner Bros. took the name, trademarked it, and used it as the main marketing tool to promote all of the music that I wrote. ... I became merely a pawn used to produce more money for Warner Bros.." heck, the guy tried to give away TWO MILLION free albums and what did the industry do? it complained! <http://distributionbusinessarticles.blogspot.com/2007/06/prince-artist-formerly-available-in.html> : Don't you think it odd that movies have an FBI warning? : How do I get the FBI to work for me too? interesting hey? : In reality, the only people that benefit from intellectual property rights : are the huge corporations that buy out the artists and make a lot of money : out of their creative work. Funnier still is the bleating going on by this same industry that the evil chinese pirates are costing them millions - especially when it has been revealed that the RIAA effectively set up part of the chinese pirate network and continue to prop it up! http://www.boycott-riaa.com/article/8836 "But if the slumping music business is dying ... it would appear that some of the wounds are self-inflicted. That's because the discs clogging Shantou's warehouses aren't pirated. Some of the world's largest record companies, including BMG, EMI and Universal, produced them..only to dump them when they didn't sell. But instead of being melted down by recyclers, the unloved discs are diverted through a network of scrap dealers and middlemen like Li, ultimately finding their way into stores in China. They are sold there for as little as a tenth of the price of officially imported discs. " "Most music-label executives won't talk about it on the record, and no one is monitoring the traffic. (BMG in New York would not comment for this article; EMI in London and Universal in Los Angeles declined repeated interview requests.) But it's clear this amorphous gray market is entrenched. The discontinued or surplus CDs, generally known as "cutouts" in the West, are in China called dakou (saw gash) because some albums have a telltale notch in the jewel box ..the prices are comparable, quality is first rate and the selection of hard-to-find foreign bands is better: ... On some albums, a song track or two has been rendered unplayable when the disc was notched, which is supposed to make it unsellable. The increasing majority, however, are pristine, still in their original shrink-wrap and often carrying the price tags of the overseas retailers that couldn't unload them. " the greedy pigs want their cake, want to eat it, want us to pay for it (twice) and want the FBI to protect them ! : The "SCARE" tactics about how evil it is for people to "COPY" or "STEAL" : your precious work are rubbish. Corbis also owns digital reproduction rights for art from the : <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/hermita : ge_museum/index.html?inline=nyt-org> Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, : Russia, the : <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/philade : lphia_museum_of_art/index.html?inline=nyt-org> Philadelphia Museum of Art : and the National Gallery in London I had no idea it went THAT far! : Intellectual property laws are how we get conned into digging our own : artistic graves. And all the rootkits and other intrusions are to make sure : that they're being enforced. illegally if necessary ( For The Greater Good) : I say let's fight for free art. that sounds like sedition uh-oh.. now we're in trouble ;) As someone, somewhere else wrote: "In the late 80's, the RIAA and member labels discovered, much to their horror, that the average LP buyer also bought a blank cassette tape, which they would then *gasp* record the album onto, for listening in the car, or work, or in a Walkman. During the PMRC fiasco Tipper Gore perpetrated on the US, Al Gore passed a blank cassette tape tax of $1 per tape going to the RIAA" to compensate them ... They made billions from peopel replacing their music libriaries onto cd, and have been completely perplexed as to why sales are down now that everyone has bought a copy or 2 of Dark Side of The Moon on cd, they're not buying anything else" .. "It is the bleakest time in the history of the music business for artists, as they cannot get signed, concert revenues are down while touring costs skyrocket, radio is dead, MTV is dead, record stores are closing daily, and the RIAA is making enemies out of their potential customers" karl
