Canadian Record Label Fights RIAA Lawsuits

An anonymous reader writes "Nettwerk Music Group, Canada's leading privately owned record label has joined the fight against the RIAA's strategy of individual lawsuits. Nettwerk CEO Terry McBride says 'Suing music fans is not the solution, it's the problem. Litigation is not "artist development." Litigation is a deterrent to creativity and passion and it is hurting the business I love. The current actions of the RIAA are not in my artists' best interests.'"

Meanwhile, in the UK....

[Richard_at_work]

The British Phonographic Industry win a court case [bbc.co.uk] against two file sharers, with Judges handing down interim damages of £1,500 and £5,000 with costs and further full damages to be determined at a later hearing.

Self-promotion

[Dekortage]

The link in the Slashdot summary goes to someone's blog (yeah, I wonder who "anonymously" submitted it). Here is the actual news item... err, press release... [marketwire.com] (as linked to from that blog).

But it's nice to see that yet another company is telling off the RIAA.

Re:Oh, fer cryin' out loud

[pla]

If they want to join the fight, then they should use their clout and cash to take a more substantive swipe at the RIAA than just a tiny, ineffective gesture.

Although they have some GREAT artists signed (Delirium, Guster, BT, Paul van Dyk, and of course their "superstars" BNL and Sarah McLachlan), most of whom have a good understanding of technology and its role in music in the modern world... Nettwerk really doesn't have that much sway in the industry overall.

You can almost think of it more as an artist collective than a real "label".

As for helping just one out of thousands of victims of the RIAA's SLAPP tactics.. Yes, I agree this counts as little more than a PR stunt. But not a self-promoting PR stunt; rather, it attempts to show that "the music industry" doesn't exist as a uniformly-evil and luddite monolithic entity. It shouts the message "go ahead and boycott Sony, but you can still buy new music without selling your soul to Rosen (Somehow, "Mitch Bainwol" doesn't have the same love-to-hate-him feel as Hilary Rosen...).

Re:Self-promotion

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just anybody's blog, there, buddy. Geist is probably Canada's leading intellectual property expert and is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He's our Larry Lessig.

So (as we say in Canada), take off, eh!

Re:Self-promotion

[djmurdoch]

The link in the Slashdot summary goes to someone's blog

I don't know if Michael Geist submitted the link, but he's actually a pretty well known columnist and copyright activist. You should check out michaelgeist.com [michaelgeist.com] for some interesting reading.

Lately there has been a lot about the Canadian election and the brouhaha over the CRIA (the Canadian RIAA) and friends supporting a candidate who was the author of a pro-business copyright bill, but generally it's a pretty interesting blog. And who knows, he may even have contributed to the electoral loss of that candidate, the minister who sponsored the bill, and the government who brought it in.

Re:Oh, fer cryin' out loud

[Anonymous Coward]

$6000? You MUST be joking. Defense like this would cost in the US, with just a regular "good" lawyer, $20,000-$40,000. Makes that $5,000 settlement REALLY attractive. Decent attorney here in New York is $200-400/hr. The PARALEGALS here are $120 an hour at big firms.

Re:Nettwerk

[Anonymous Coward]

Careful about this. The US release of Sarah McLachlan was Sony-fied. The Netwerk Canadian release is not, and you can purchase MP3's off their web site.

Double check the DRM'd album and see if it's US distributed by another RIAA group member.

Re:Conservatives will bring lawsuits to Canada.

[Chaos Continuum]

The Canadian Government will first have to remove the Levy that we Canadians are paying on blank CD's. The levy was introduced to help counter act the monetary loss they percieved was going to happen. We already are paying for our right to download music. And before people say it is still illegal under copyright, it is not here in Canada as long as you do not use it for profit.

They also sell their music online, free of DRM

[Kittyflipping]

on emusic [emusic.com]. I buy there whenever possible, to 'protest DRM with my wallet' so to speak. Otherwise I just buy the CD and rip it.

Download mp3s!

[chris098]

Just another reason to love nettwerk - I was checking out their website (http://www.nettwerk.com/ [nettwerk.com]) and noticed that you could pay for music ($0.99) and download a real mp3. No DRM included. While it's not quite as impressive as OGG files would be, it's just another example demonstrating that not all the record labels are RIAA-evil.

Re:Conservatives will bring lawsuits to Canada.

[Braxton_the_Covenant]

Yeah but saying the Conservatives are furthest to the right of the four parties (the other three being as left or lefter than their their brothers in the U.S. Democratic Party) is not saying much. While visions of socialism or social democracy dance around the heads of the NDP, Bloc, and Liberals, it is visions of mercantilism, in one form or another, that dance about the Conservatives heads.

The NDP is probably the party that cares most about consumer's interests in laws being passed, but as usual, it is caring in a loopy hardcore leftist sort of way, which always tends towards solutions that disregard the voluntary and free choices of the property owners and tends to assume that the government is the real owner of everything in the country.