Nobody expects ...
Franco is alive and well in Valencia
http://homepage.mac.com/jorgecortell/blogwavestudio/LH20041209105106/LHA20050520091532/index.html
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I can live with the fact that someone writes or records songs and wants some money back. Fair enough, I'm partly living from copyrights myself.
Unfortunately, artists are represented by record companies. These come in flavors. I suppose there are a lot of people in the industry trying to do an honest job. On the other hand, American record companies might be worse than those from a lot of other nationalities. I'll never forget the story of the Dutch Country & Western singer Ilse de Lange, who won an US award for the best foreign C&W something. She assumed this would help the sales of her album and, well, it did, it sold quite well. What did she earn of it?
Well, nothing. After the promotional caviar had been eaten and the foto-op stretch limo sent back to the rental, it transpired that costs were deducted from her royalties, not from the corporate account. Oops, sorry somehow no one could have been bothered to tell her.
Translate to this to the book business, and imagine contracts were writers would have to pay for the the printing of their books. Do you like the Da Vinci Code? Good, for that would just be just about the only thing you'd have to read.
I guess the trees would like it.
Record companies themselves are represented by the-end-justifies-the-means organisations like the RIAA, MPA and all kinds of other acronyms vaguely sounding like sexually-transmitted disorders. Leave it to them, and we'd all still be without VCRs and DVD-records. I guess ultimately they'd also like to declare pencils, pens and paper illegal. Someone might just copy a song lyric from a CD-booklet, you know ... *shiver*. Thankfully, judges have seen this in another way.
However, what really gets to me is their hypocrisy. Mother Teresa couldn't have been more convinced of her own moral superiority than the entertainment industry.
"We need high prices to protect small shops and keep a great variety of choice."
No matter that all those shops, small or big, offer the same kind of braindead garbage.
"Our prices are absolutely fair, and there's no pricing kartel whatsoever."
No matter that there have been mysterious differences in price levels between various countries. And I'm not referring to countries with a different standard of living like the US of A and Shri-Lanka, but the USA and the UK, or the UK and say, Holland. That goes for CDs, that have to be repackaged and transported, but also for digital music. Buy the same MP3 song from Weston-super-Mare instead of from Okeefenokee, and the price remains more or less the same, only dollarcents have become pence.
"The current crisis in CD-sales is all the fault of P2P-filesharing."
Well, if good looks are so important in music - even a classical music catalog looks like it comes from a modelling agency these days - why not buy the DVD? That's what people do, and could you blame them? The CD shops of the big record selling chain in my town effectively have become 50, 60 percent or DVD shops. And perhaps it might also have something to do with the fact that the money types who run the business feel more at ease negotiating an eight digit contract for Britney at a posh restaurant than spending a fraction of that money and a lot more time in out-of -the-way venues and find that elusive garage band that might be significantly different. The first gives the illusion of guaranteed hits, the second requires genuine knowledge and interest in music as well business instinct. D'oh...
Basically their message is: 'Please don't steal from the musicians, that's our job.'
And then there's the Spanish equivalent of the RIAA and similar diseases, and the university of Valencia.
For long I've lived under the assumption that Spain is not a banana republic. Or a banana kingdom, for that matter.
I know Valencia well. I love it. Few if any public hangings and auto da fés, no more street crime than in other Spanish towns, and lots of nice buildings, food and people, really a decent place.
By the looks of it. But then again, nobody expects the Spanish...
When, this month of May, a teacher of the University of Valencia wanted to lecture on P2P, he was denied a venue. And again. Then he held it in some cafetaria, and he was fired. As in F-I-R-E-D. When people asked questions, the University denied he had even worked there - although he had, for five years.
Yes folks, this is Europe 2005, not Torquemada Castilia or Franco Espana. The teacher wasn't discussing controversial stuff like Right to Live, 'Bombing Mecca now!' or the mental sanity of various heads of state I could mention. He was talking about P2P, and I'm confident he did it in a much more scholarly, balanced way than I do. Still, he was censored, fired, in the best police state tradition. Only, it wasn't done by the police or the state, it was Big Money Inc.
Do what you want, but please, please don't pretend that those teenagers swapping MP3 are bigger criminals than you are.
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