Posts Tagged ‘Copyrighting’
June 19th, 2009 | 
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If there is any industry who is less out of touch with its customers than the music industry then I defy it be suggested. As if going after die-hard fourteen year-old Coldplay fans wasn’t enough, record companies are now extending their copyright war by taking legal action against websites that offer unsolicited music scores (BBC news). When 
are the CEO’s of these belligerent organisations going to wake up and realise that you don’t make money suing your customers?
Since the arrival of MP3 files, record company chiefs have been on nothing short of a witch hunt to identify the key perpetrators of their traditionally gargantuan and monopolistic hold over music buyers, fining key offenders of the Copyright Law up to sums of $150,000. Unlike their plans to prosecute websites ‘illegally’ publishing music scores however, the disolusioned Chief Executives and their equally moronic corporate camaraderie of amateur A&R producers haven’t been able to touch offending sites like KaZaa, Grokster and Morpheus for as far as legalese is concerned, these sites are just ‘pipelines’ and the prosecutable offenders are, unfortunately, individuals.
Most industry chiefs would have acknowledged, logically enough, that the sheer number of offenders was too overwhelming on both time and cashflow to address through the courtroom and responded to the problem by trying to provide some alternative platform for distribution to the one their ‘customers’ were currently using, offering features which made them want to pay for it. But the Magnates of Music have never much cared for treating their customers with courtesy, and they weren’t about to start this time round.
What has transpired is a five-plus year spending spree of what can only be described as cringeable management practice, with the net result of most legal campaigns – even richer prosecuting attorneys. In the process, record companies have done little else but whine to anti-trust regulators about how margins are being squeezed and get away with outrageously gargantuan mergers the likes of which would be inconceivable in any other industry.