US music royalties' collector sues T-Mobile over ringback tones Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) quietly filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the US wing of T-Mobile last month. On 19 December the performing rights’ group fingered the telecoms firm for allegedly using unlicensed copies of BMI’s repertoire on its ringback tones service. The BMI said it had licensed ringback tones on …
Really, we ought to drag all the copyright lawyers outside and sever body parts with accurately thrown LPs. Leave the bastards lying in the street with blood spewing out like a cheap horror flick.
While I, and any decent person, respects the right to an artist to gain benefit for their creations, this has gone far beyond being a parody of itself to being just obscene. How many artists (Bono excepted, STFU already) actually morally support the way things are going? A world where ringtones count as a performance, playing your CDs with the car windows open counts as a broadcast, and people who didn't create the content in question expect to be paid hansomely for your trivial mistake. OMFG.
Copyright infringement? Hard to say, but I'd still be delighted if they were banned.
"Are the millions of people who have bought ringtones breaking the law if they forget to silence their phones in a restaurant? Under this reasoning from ASCAP, it would be a copyright violation for you to play your car radio with the window down!""
Again, I have no problems with the above being declared illegal / punishable by death.
"Are the millions of people who have bought ringtones breaking the law...?"
No, but the company who trousered a ton of money for streaming ringtones to people's phones and then refused to pay the creators of those ringtones most certainly are. They're broadcasting streaming music in exactly the same way as an internet radio station does, so they're subject to exactly the same rules. Jeez, sometimes I wonder how EFF guys manage to tie their own shoelaces.
Making people pay more than once (pay-per-period, pay-per-listen/view) for media is an outright obscenity. This is why DRM must be fought tooth and nail as well - because it's used to enforce this kind of scam.
And they have the temerity to call us freetards "thieves"!
They charge a bomb for several seconds worth of relatively low quality audio from a several minutes worth of high quality music track, where the entire track can be had at about 20% of the cost.
Now they're taking offence at a company that's onselling these for nothing.
Sounds fair. They've realised that users don't want to pay for high-quality full tracks, yet are happy (or stupid enough) to open their wallets for something they could have done themselves with little effort, for a tiny fraction of the cost.
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They charge a bomb for several seconds worth of relatively low quality audio from a several minutes worth of high quality music track, where the entire track can be had at about 20% of the cost.
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I hope by quality you are referring to bitrate/sampling frequency rather than any artistic merit. I couldn't imagine it being used to describe most of the sort of tracks that are on the ringtone adverts in any other sense.
The only thing in the world more annoying than ringtones.
I'd like to thank the BMI for identifying a way of sueing the fuck out of T-mobile for selling this shit.
Personally I think the only just punishment here would be to strap the CEO of T-mobile into a chair, gag him, gaffer tape two handsets over his ears and then set 'em to playing the same godawfully shite 20 second song clip on loop, with the volume turned up far enough to make the earpiece speakers distort. Failing that though, this will have to do.
"it would be a copyright violation for you to play your car radio with the window down!"
I'm sure somewhere there's an industry bigwig dreaming up a way to charge for this. After all, if you hear the latest <insert "cool" musician name here> track being pumped out of a car stereo with a decible - drivers IQ ratio of 3:1 then you might decide that you don't need to buy it, clearly therefore a "lost sale" and clearly depriving said industry bigwig of that weeks coke supply, sorry, I mean depriving "cool" musician of vital revenue which will mean that they have to give up their dreams of making music and go to work in McDonalds
Of course, having heard the song pumping out of a car stereo, the only reason that there'd be a "lost sale" is because you realised how cr@p it was.
for a radical review of global music licensing laws and processes. The artists don't benefit from these suits HALF as much as labels, distributors and so on. The time is right to put the power back in the artist's hands and to sell music directly from artist to consumer - I'd be a lot happier paying an artist directly for his stuff than paying some faceless corporation! And, of course, if I needed a CD version I'd burn one. But I'd be far more likely to carry my music around on my MP3 player of choice and broadcast it direct to my car/home stereo as required...
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