Canada's 4 biggest music labels fined $50mil

[thewayne]

"The 2008 class action alleges that the record companies “exploited” music owners by reproducing and selling in excess of 300,000 song titles without securing licenses from the copyright owners and/or without paying the associated royalty payments."

There's nothing like stealing directly from your clients.

http://www.canoe.com/cgi-bin/imprimer.cgi?langue=A&id=818616

Comments

[silveradept]

Shouldn't they be looking in at the excessive fines that the Americans have been putting on people, and scale it up appropriately? $50million is a wrist-slap. $50 billion would be on the right scale of what they do to consumers.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

That would indeed be a thing of beauty, but it ain't gonna happen. The ??AA have too much leverage in the political process to receive much more than a slap on the wrist, look at how many former ??AA attorneys are now in Obama's justice department, much less the recently approved Comcast/NBC merger.

Money talks, bullshit walks. We are no longer a republic or democracy, we're now a corporatocracy.

[silveradept]

This we know. But it would be nice that if a judge or jury, having decided there was a violation there, lit into them with a fine that was just this side of "going to be appealed for outrageousness" instead of "*slap* Don't do that again in such a way that we conclude it's wrong."

[moiraj.livejournal.com]

I was about to say that I would have a hard time believing Canadian companies would have $50B to offer up for a settlement - our companies don't have nearly the kind of wealth American companies do, as far as I know - but as they're branches of American companies, they might have a lot more money available to them.

I'm speaking from impressions, not actual knowledge. (Hey, I could be a politician!)

[silveradept]

They might, being branches of said corporation, but even if they don't, it would still serve as the object lesson - fining those corporations beyond their ability to pay and holding them to it gives them an idea of what happens when you slap a consumer and alleged file-sharer with a fine beyond their ability to pay it. The lesson might sink in if applied repeatedly.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

That's the beauty of corporate structuring. American version has lots of money, foreign version has little money and gets smacked with a fine, doesn't affect big parent! Everybody (Wall Street) wins!

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

(there was a [/sarcasm] tag there at the end)