"I've never been in favor of either of them. ASCAP are a bunch of assholes, as big or bigger than the RIAA. ASCAP does not help the artists."

I've talked to some folks who've made a couple of hundred bucks a month from radio airplay. These weren't big-name artists. If you're of a certain income, you might scoff at a measly couple of hundred bucks a month -- but for a struggling songwriter (and most are), it can pay for groceries or the rent. For the lesser-known songwriters and lyricists, it's not uncommon to make more money in performance royalties than you make in mechanical royalties paid by the label.

"They take a tax out of every venue on the assumption that there might be some music played by some artist that they represent."

Sorta. If you want to play music licensed through ASCAP or BMI then you purchase a license. It's not mandatory. If you have, say, a bar or club and you don't thik you'll get any financial gain out of playing music at your establishment, then you can skip the license.

"And the redistribution works like with the RIAA... the top acts get a ton of cash, the rest get fuck-all. After ASCAP takes their fees, of course."

You're correct that fees are distributed roughly in proportion to popularity. The song and lyric writing biz is a bit unfair this way; popularity often doesn't scale to talent. They used to measure only by radio airplay sampling, but in recent years they've made it more equitable, by getting playlists from satellite and Internet radio stations, for instance -- which play a lot more eclectic and lesser-known music.

"ASCAP is just as much of a cancer on 90% of artists and the public as the RIAA is."

If you're a songwriter or lyricist, there are tons of good reasons to join ASCAP/BMI, and no reasons not to. There's a one-time $25 fee to apply, but if you don't think that you'll be able to collect $25 in performance royalties during your career, perhaps you're in the wrong business!

The RIAA certainly doesn't care about you; they look after the record labels and they certainly don't have your interests in mind. They wouldn't even offer mechanicals if they weren't legally obligated to. By contrast, ASCAP has your back. They're run by and for artists. If you get minor airplay only on obscure XM stations, can you expect to get as big a check as the guy who wrote Beyonce's latest hit? No, but this isn't an ASCAP issue. ASCAP is just there to be an advocacy organization for artists; they're not obligated to pay each member equally.

Remember, ASCAP's primary function is to collect and redistribute royalties. Their operating costs are a small, small portion of the fees they collect and pass through. The RIAA is a trade organization for the record labels the record labels pay them, not the other way around.

They're a collective. Their execs are board members. You might recognize some of the names: Paul Williams (the president and chairman of the board), Hal David, Johnny Mandel, Marilyn Bergman, Jimmy Webb, and so on. ASCAP is truly run by and for artists.

I can think of a few reasons why Paul Williams should be punished beyond the issue at hand.

There's an interesting dichotomy here. We generally regard the record labels (as represented by the RIAA) as the "bad guys," and the artists (who are represented by ASCAP) as the "good guys." We are generally in favor of ASCAP, as it allows artists to make money via a revenue stream that the record labels can't touch. But whenever ASCAP does something in its own interests, our hatred toward them burns just as brightly as it does for the record labels.

The popular wisdom on Slashdot (I'm not inferring that it's correct) is that artists don't actually make money on song sales. If ASCAP's scheme were to become reality, it would (per popular Slashdot wisdom) finally allow the artists to make a little money, too.

While in general I wouldn't mind if Apple threw ASCAP a bit of money, the additional costs would likely be reflected in higher prices. While I'm generally a big fan of musicians and I understand ASCAP's obligation here to try to get as much money for the artists that they can, I think this is a bad move. A 30-second clip for the purposes of generating a sale should fall outside the boundaries for licensable performances.

The huge difference is that you would be acting in good faith. Steven Chen was not.

The more I read about the case and about his businesses, it's clearly not a case of "innocent webhost caught in the crossfire." It's more like "entrepreneur sees market in providing hosting to companies selling counterfeit goods, profits from it, gets caught." Before he was in this business, he catered to spammers.

Sometimes there are bad guys out there./p.

"Yes it rather is setting a nasty precedent. Either these webhosts will filter the heck out of their content and lose out to some other site that doesn't [eg. the pirate bay] or copyright claims are nigh unenforceable for small acts of copyright infringement."

The case in TFA is about trademark infringement. There's already plenty of precedent in the US for going after webhosts who knowingly allow their users to infringe copyright. This is why the US-based P2P services (remember Aimster?) and the big US-based tracker sites that specialized in pirated material are largely gone. Note that I wrote "largely" -- there are still a few around, but typically because they haven't yet caught the attention of the feds, and not because they've discovered some magic loophole.

We don't know all the facts in this case. Judges and lawyers are typically somewhat intelligent, and given the size of the judgement, it appears that mens rea was applied here -- Steven Chen knew exactly what he was doing, in the same way that tracker owners will tell you that they don't know nothing about no piracy when in truth they understand that it's their bread and butter. Googling his company names gives the impression that Steven Chen wasn't simply running a respectable hosting company. Like tracker operators see the demand for pirated materials, Steven catered to spammers and purveyors of counterfeit goods.

"I love those numbers. So she, as a single file-sharer, cost them $1.92 million dollars."

Straw man. These are statutory damages. The record labels don't have to show or even claim that they've lost this amount.

"So it's ok to punish someone even though you can't prove they damaged you or how much they damaged you? "

At the risk of oversimplifying, that's pretty much the point of statutory damages.

"I am not that surprised but a bit disappointed. I thought that with Obama USA was going to take the lead on the issue of copyright in the 21st century. Do not expect many outbreaks from Europe right now. I hope he is just fixing issues by order of priority and that copyright reform is still somewhere on the list."

IP is one of the country's leading exports. As more and more manufacturing leaves the US and the world settles more firmly into the post-industrial age, the revenue stream from media, software and the like is going to be even more important.

We like to dream of a world in which Windows is open source, the Berne Convention is abolished, and the iTunes store shuts its doors, and we'll all live in an information utopia where art is created only for arts' sake. Linux and Magnatunes will finally get the success that they deserve, everybody who's ever been on "MTV Cribs" will be thrown into the lake of fire, yadda yadda. But the sad and ugly truth is that our nation's economy is run on IP, and money is a bit tight right now.

"I don't care for iTunes, since most of the music on it is DRM-laden, and I refuse to buy music that behaves on someone else's whim."

Apple began phasing out DRM in January, and their entire catalog is not DRM-free. They joined the ranks of Amazon MP3 and several other online stores (some big, some small, some good, some not so good) that were already selling DRM-free music. The record companies waking up to the notion that DRM isn't useful was long overdue, but I'm glad finally happened.

"What needs to be done is have a subscription service that works across all platforms, costs some money ($15 a month? $30 a month?), and has a good catalog. That wouldn't solve everything, but it would be a steady stream of money, and it wouldn't be too hard to track which artists are the most listened to, and distribute the money accordingly. For what it's worth, Rhapsody also sells music a track at a time in DRM-free MP3 format."

Rhapsody does most of this. They're not Mac-friendly, but I pay $15 a month and I can listen to it on my Windows box and on my Squeezebox. Their royalty payment system works just like you describe.

"No, documented fact. Hence why they keep getting hit with fines for anti-trust/price-fixing violations."

When accusing record companies of being dishonest, it is important -- essential -- that we not spread lies as well. What is there to be gained? Seriously, Mr. MaskedSlacker -- with so many bad things that the record labels do, why make shit up? Why?

You're referring to the Universal price-fixing case of about a decade ago. It had absolutely nothing to do with collusion between record companies; it was all about a market technique called "minimum advertised pricing" -- known in the retail industry as MAP. Here's what happened:

• Wal-Mart and Best Buy started getting into the business of selling CDs. Since the sale of CDs was just a lure to get customers into the store, they sold CDs at little or no margin.
• A couple of record store chains that you might remember from your childhood, Tower Records being probably the one we all remember, went into freak-out mode and complained to the record labels that Wal-Mart and Best Buy were going to drive them out of business.
• Universal stepped in and instituted a MAP program with these retailers. In this case the details were that Universal would give the record labels money to run advertising (called "co-op advertising" in the retail business) in exchange for not advertising CDs at below a certain price set by Universal.

At this point I should stop and point out that MAPs are still alive and well today. It's an interesting distinction -- authorized dealers are welcome to sell product at any price (otherwise it would be illegal), but if they advertise prices below a point set by the manufacturer, they don't get co-op money, or the best rebates, or other perks that authorized dealers typically get. A huge number of companies do MAPs, including companies well-loved by Slashdotters. Apple is one of them.

Anyway, back to 1999 or so:

• Wal-Mart and Best Buy, upon hearing of Universal's authorized dealer MAP program, went to the government.
• Wal-Mart and Best Buy having the weight they do, the government stepped in, agreed that Universal's MAP program was a little too close to price-fixing, told Universal to stop it immediately, and set up a program in which anybody who'd bought CDs at Tower Records or the other resellers could get some money back.
• Tower Records, of course, went out of business shortly thereafter. They simply could not compete with Wal-Mart and Best Buy.

The price-fixing settlement is a good thing if you subscribe to the "What's good for Wal-Mart is good for America" philosophy, or if you don't particularly mourn the death of the indie record store. On that point, however, I think Tower would be out of business today anyway; the price-fixing ruling simply hastened their death.

"You can a lifetime in practice and never get closer to the Supreme Court than the Gray Line bus tour."

I may be mistaken, but I believe it was Nessen himself who argued MGM v. Grokster before the Supreme Court. Perhaps he's hoping that lighting will strike twice.

"Nor is he entitled to flood the P2P nets with his own DiVX rips. The unlicensed wholesale distribution."

That's well-established (except perhaps in Slashdot land), but he has nothing to lose to try to change this. His house is already paid for.

Just to jump on what RedK wrote... I didn't explain because I thought it was already well-known that the RIAA is taking people to court for distribution, not downloading. To be fair, you're not the first to make this mistake.

Not sure why you think Tennenbaum deserves a "life sentence." When I wrote that statutory damages should be "reeled in" I meant that they should be lowered significantly. This might be a bit of American slang, so if you're not a US resident I can see the soure of confusion.

"A smart lawyer could argue this verdict is unconstitutional since a life sentence is "cruel and unusual punishment" for merely downloading ~$30 worth of songs."

Using the phrase "merely downloading" is dangerously misleading, as he was not merely downloading them.

Lots of torts have pretty high limits on statutory damages, so I don't think there's a constitutional issue here. I do, however, think that the statutory limits need to be reeled in. They were set back in the days when massive distribution was almost always done for profit (since there were a lot of costs involved in massive distribution). Now that the costs are nil, the statutory maximums should be lowered accordingly. I think they should top out at around $1,000 for works which have a market value of about a buck.

But this may be a "be careful what you wish for" issue. If the statutory maximum were $1K per work, then Tennenbaum might have been nailed for $30K. Or the record labels may have gone to court over 60 songs, not just 30. It still would have been a very bad day for the defendant. Reducing the statutory maximum wouldn't discourage copyright owners from going to court; the record labels are doing this to make a point, not to create a profit center.

They submitted fair use as a defense with the likely understanding that it would be rejected. This is Nesson's ticket to appeal.

My guess is that Nesson knows he can't get precedent set at the district court level. MGM v. Grokster made it to the Supreme Court, and I think Nesson wants to take this one to the Supremes. Tennenbaum didn't have a chance with the current interpretation of the law (basically "copyright infringement is bad, mmmkay?"), so he's trying to shake things up.

That's just my interpretation. The other possibility is that he's simply an idiot, but it's already established that he's a very smart guy.