[LAU] ASCAP Assails Free-Culture, Digital-Rights Groups

[Mark Knecht]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 4:09 PM, andy baxter
<andy at earthsong.free-online.co.uk> wrote:
<SNIP>
> I think the same thing sometimes. The copyrighted music I download is all
> stuff that's been around for some time, and I don't see anything wrong about
> that,

Please consider that many artists get/got lousy royalty deals when
they are/were young. Managers and recording companies took terrible
advantage of them and the money went elsewhere. These folks have grown
old and many of them aren't rich. However a lot of these contracts
exist for a number of years, expire and then the artists actually
start to earn more which is very important to them. For every
Beatles/Stones/Pink Floyd that wouldn't miss a dollar from you there
are hundreds if not thousands of artists that really _need_ the money.

I understand that there are many in the world that feel that because
things like movies and music are digital and can be downloaded for
free that they should be downloaded independent of the ownership of
them. I had some discussions with NetFlix recently about why they
don't support Linux with their Instant Watch environment. The answer
was (paraphrased) 'Because it's s den of thieves...'

We get the world we create.

Just my 2 cents...

- Mark