Actually, awful as this is, record companies were worse. Why? Because if you didn't sign up to their deal, your music would never be heard on record, and if you did, you were not only signing all your rights over to them, but also usually the next few albums (aka years of work) over to them as well.
I know a lot of people hate Google (it's no surprise this was another Orlowski piece), but it's too easy to forget that they seem bad because you can see what they are doing, whereas when it was record companies / publishers / ..., all that stuff was much less widely known.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
