[LINK] Labels may be losing money,

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

We really need to find a way forward here ..

--
The MPAA Runs Amok

By Nick Farrell Friday, 13 November 2009, 11:34 (snipped)
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/opinion/1562057/the-mpaa-runs-amok


A SMALL TOWN, Coshocton, in the former British colony of Virginia is 
paying the price of not standing up to the MPAA.

Imagine its shock when the MPAA forced the town to shut down its entire 
free municipal WiFi network, because of a single instance, of a single 
user, illegally downloading a copyrighted movie.

We are not talking a big network here. Sometimes it handles 100 people a 
day during busy times. 

Because the whole network has a single IP address, the town did not know 
who the pirate was, so the MPAA demanded that the network be shut off.

The closure of the network means that the Coshocton County Sheriff's 
deputies can't complete a traffic or incident report.

The case is fairly typical of what has been happening on a wider scale 
across the world. 

The MPAA and its music industry cousin the RIAA have been running around, 
lobbying about the perils of 'piracy' and screaming that they'll be 
forced out of business, and Western civilisation will fall, unless peer-
to-peer filesharing is stamped out, or everyone even suspected of 
copyright infringement is hounded, fined, booted off the Internet, or all 
of the above, plus criminalised.

France was prepared to switch off Internet connections to those the MPAA 
and RIAA said were 'pirates'. 

It was only when it was pointed out that this was against the 
constitution without due process of law that the government backed down, 
partly.

In the US, the RIAA has been litigious and made a fool of itself by 
dragging children, the elderly and dead people into court to face 
"piracy" charges.

In other words we are not dealing with nice people, we are dealing with 
bullies and stick-up artists, much like common muggers except they wear 
suits. 

We elect people to protect us from such things. Society is supposed to 
collectvely stand up against the overly aggressive

The shutting down of a small town network is a microcosm of what the 
entertainment industry would do to the Internet if we give it control. 

Rather than protecting us, lawmakers are happy to give in and switch off 
whoever the RIAA, MPAA and their cronies point to. 

In this case it was a whole town, but why not all the users of an ISP, a 
cable firm, mobile carrier or telecom?

Any sympathy they might have attracted in their war against 'piracy' they 
have squandered by their greedy, self-serving, neurotic and paranoid 
behaviour.

It is clearly time for the body politic to tell these clowns to go away. 


> http://labs.timesonline.co.uk/blog/2009/11/12/do-music-artists-do-
better-in> -a-world-with-illegal-file-sharing/
> 
> > Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing?
> >
> >
> > This is the graph the record industry doesn’t want you to see.
> > It shows the fate of the three main pillars of music industry 
> > revenue - recorded music, live music, and PRS revenues (royalties 
> > collected on behalf of artists when their music is played in public) 
> > over the last 5 years.
> >
> > We’ve broken each category into two sub-categories so that, for any 
> > chunk of revenue - recorded music sales, for instance - you can see 
> > the percentage that goes to the artist, and the percentage that goes 
> > elsewhere. (In the case of recorded music, the lion’s share of 
> > revenue goes to the record label; in the case of live, the promoter 
> > takes a cut etc.)
> >
> > Hopefully, this analysis - and there’s more on the nuts and bolts of 
> > our method below - sheds some factual light on the claims and 
> > counter-claims that are paranoically sweeping across the music 
> > industry establishment, not least that put forward by the singer 
> > Lily Allen in this paper recently - and the BPI - that artists are 
> > losing out as a result of the fall in sales of recorded of music.
> >
> > The most immediate revelation, of course, is that at some point next 
> > year revenues from gigs payable to artists will for the first time 
> > overtake revenues accrued by labels from sales of recorded music.
> >
> > Why live revenues have grown so stridently is beyond the scope of 
> > this article, but our data - compiled from a PRS for Music report 
> > and the BPI - make two things clear: one, that the growth in live 
> > revenue shows no signs of slowing and two, that live is by far and 
> > away the most lucrative section of industry revenue for artists 
> > themselves, because they retain such a big percentage of the money 
> > from ticket sales.
> >
> > (It’s often claimed that live revenues are only/mostly benefitting 
> 
> > so-called ‘heritage acts’. Unfortunately, the data doesn’t shed
> > any light on this because live revenues are not broken down by type
> > of act, gig size or ticket price.)
> >
> 
> ....
> 
> > An even more striking thing, perhaps, emerges in this second graph, 
> 
> > namely that revenues accrued by artists themselves have in fact 
> 
> > risen over the past 5 years, despite the fall in record sales. (All 
> 
> > the blue bars in the chart above represent revenues that go directly 
> 
> > to artists. As you can see, the ‘blue total’ has risen noticeably.) 
> 
> > This is mostly because of live revenues, but also because of the 
> 
> > growing amount collected by the PRS on behalf of artists, which 
> 
> > accounts for a much bigger chunk of industry revenues than most 
> 
> > people realise.
> >
> 
> 
> --
> 
> Kim Holburn
> IT Network & Security Consultant
> Ph: +39 06 855 4294  M: +39 3494957443
> mailto:kim at holburn.net  aim://kimholburn
> skype://kholburn - PGP Public Key on request
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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