Theres this little known and loved company called the RIAA (collection of Lawyers for the big four record companies)
and they tend to sue people who share or download music off the internet, including children and dead people.
Draconian threats of $250,000 per track and the people who share/download are worse than terrorists, and deserve to rot in hell etc, taking the bread out of poor starving pop stars mouths, cant afford a third mansion, or a forth limo etc etc
Then you have EMI, one of the big four record companys which make up the RIAA, plus the swarm of smaller ones than need to be members of, because it was hard or impossible to get access to CD pressing plants if you were not RIAA affiliated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Well shock horror it seems that EMI are selling, downloading, pirating music they dont have the rights to...
Will they be sued by the RIAA in a court case and charged $250,000 per track to compensate for lose of revenue ?
Ok so mistakes happen, but big companies like EMI are stuffed to the gills with lawyers and legal people, mistakes like this should never happen in big companies, esp when big company is competing with small companies.
King Crimson have their own record company (non RIAA) and sell their OWN music online, so EMI is committing commercial sabotage (and industrial piracy) with their illegal selling of KC music online, well worthy of the $250,000 penalty under the DCMA rules.
Apparently, EMI may have flogged some King Crimson CDs when it shouldn't have and cryptically Fripp refers to returns of unsold CDs. "A concern with returns is always that they are not dumped back onto the market by mistake (by mistake, dear reader)," he writes.
But it is the issue of downloads that is causing most headaches.
"After the licence (with EMI) expired," writes Fripp, "King Crimson tracks repeatedly appeared on various download websites licensed from EMI. If this had happened during the licence period, it would have been disturbing – even though shit happens and we should have gotten over it! - because EMI never had download rights from us."
This, mainly, is because when the licence period began, there was no such thing as downloads. Fripp says the EMI licence was subsequently not renewed because he and the band were not willing to approve download rights, "because the royalty terms offered sucked."
http://www.theinquirer.net/...
It would be amusing to see the RIAA sue itself in court.
Ignorance is not a defence in law, it might mitigate the sentence but not the conviction.
The RIAA copyright cases they pursue against the Kazaa hordes is a good example of this, there was loads of dodgy websites promoting and selling kazaa software and offering the software for $30 and the chance of free music, to use and download music with these programs was illegal and got a lot of people sued etc.
The major trouble was that on the websites they had big statements saying it was legal to use the software, and people who didnt know any better thought by paying for kazaa they authorised to download music, OK so they were dumb, but theres lots of dumb people out there that are not lawyers, and contrariwise lawyers who are dumb