This is from the year 2000 and worth revisiting. Salon magazine published a transcript of Courtney’s speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference, given in New York:
Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist’s work without any intention of paying for it. I’m not talking about Napster-type software.
I’m talking about major label recording contracts.
I want to start with a story about rock bands and record companies, and do some recording-contract math:
This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my “funny” math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I’m positive it’s better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide.
What happens to that million dollars?
They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager.
That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there’s $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person.
Full story here.
admin Miscellaneous copyright, intellectual property, music
Erick Schonfeld has a post on
TechCrunch summarizing the kuffufle around newspapers, Google, and business models:
The newspaper industry is making a lot of noise these days about the Web “stealing” its content and destroying its business. Invariably, the newsmen point their ink-stained fingers at blogs, which arenothing more than “parasites”
, or at Google, which is supposedly aiding and abetting in the wholesale theft of the newspaper’s precious words. Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Wall Street Journaland other fine (and not-so-fine) publications, recently warnedthat the industry should no longer allow Google “to steal our copyrights.” And yesterday, the A.P. declared all out war against the Internet.
PaidContent.org has an interview with Dean Singleton, AP Chairman. According to Singleton:
I think our industry has been very timid about protecting our content, probably because we’ve done so well in the past few years that we didn’t recognize that misappropriation is as serious an issue as it is. As we’re now relooking at business models, it’s become clear that we must protect the rights of our content…
admin Miscellaneous intellectual property, newspapers
Robert Darnton tries to unravel the implications of the ‘Google Books Settlement’ and its impact on the future by looking at the past:
When I look backward, I fix my gaze on the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, its faith in the power of knowledge, and the world of ideas in which it operated—what the enlightened referred to as the Republic of Letters. The eighteenth century imagined the Republic of Letters as a realm with no police, no boundaries, and no inequalities other than those determined by talent. Anyone could join it by exercising the two main attributes of citizenship, writing and reading. Writers formulated ideas, and readers judged them. Thanks to the power of the printed word, the judgments spread in widening circles, and the strongest arguments won.
Engaging read in The New York Review here.
admin Miscellaneous books, intellectual property