Warner CEO Admits His Kids Stole Music 533
IAmTheDave writes "Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman admitted that he was fairly certain that one or more of his children had downloaded music illegally, but despite this direct admission of guilt, no lawsuits are pending. Surprised? Bronfman insists that, after a stern talking-to, his children have suffered the full consequences of their actions. 'I explained to them what I believe is right, that the principle is that stealing music is stealing music. Frankly, right is right and wrong is wrong, particularly when a parent is talking to a child. A bright line around moral responsibility is very important. I can assure you they no longer do that.' I wonder if all of the people currently being sued/extorted can now just claim that they 'no longer do that.'"
All people are equal (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds familiar.
And not surprising.
Meh...welcome to Real Life (Score:4, Insightful)
Next you'll be telling me that the President's daughters got drunk underage but nothing came of it.
hello?? - the guy runs a music label (Score:2, Insightful)
Download vs Share (Score:3, Insightful)
It's still hypocritical, but if I'm right about the circumstances above then calling for his kids to be sued for _downloading_ makes people look stupid.
Re:Meh...welcome to Real Life (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Meh...welcome to Real Life (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:All people are equal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Meh...welcome to Real Life (Score:3, Insightful)
He should pay up, cynically (Score:3, Insightful)
The guy probably ought to take a guess about how much was uploaded and pay the full $750 apiece. I'm sure he can afford it. That way he can claim to be evenhanded. It's rubbish, of course, but it avoids letting other people claim favoritism when they're sued.
Don't even take it out of their allowances, so when the next parent comes up in court, he can claim that they expect parents to be responsible for what their kids upload.
Re:Meh...welcome to Real Life (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose you'd have fit right in in Germany circa WWII.
No wonder our country is being dismantled, destroyed and fed to corporations. Because "life's not fair" and voting and taxes are our only responsibilities to it. Fixing it when it's broken and causing additional, unnecessary unfairness, well that's somebody else's problem.
Oh, and no, I don't know what to do about it either--but dismissing evil behavior offhand is not even a possibility.
I probably wouldn't have ranted if your post had been modded funny (as you probably intended) rather than insightful.
Yes, they are. (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you have any idea at all how peer-to-peer networks work? Every downloader is an uploader as well.
There's nothing clever, fiendishly or otherwise, about their plan. It's really stupidly simple: sue enough people so that word gets around that if you download music, you'll be sued. Then people will (theoretically) stop downloading music.
The problem with their stupidly simple plan is that it's not working. Why? Among other reasons:
I'm sorry, but "clever" is not an adjective that I would apply to any company associated with the **AA. Fiendish? Yeah, I can live with that one.
So... Since this guy is a billionare...... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Meh...welcome to Real Life (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that abuse of power, unfair application of the legal system and the justice system is always newsworthy and always worth fighting against. Not only that but the hypocrisy of this situation makes it all the more vulgar. If we got news that the head of MADD had some underage daughters who got drunk after school and they got the beer from their mom then maybe your analogy would make an inkling of sense. As it stands your analogy might as well be comparing asteroids to hemorrhoids. The two things have no relation so the analogy only serves to distract. So back on topic; this man deserves to have his children put on trial, his personal computer confiscated, his name smeared in the mud and his reputation shot to pieces because that is what he supports the RIAA doing in the same situation with consumers. That or he needs to confess that such a strategy is over the top and commit to changing the RIAA's ways.
Re:Meh...welcome to Real Life (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people who use the phrase "Life's not fair" should also, for the sake of honesty, add the caveat "and not only don't I want to do anything about it, I don't want you to do anything about it, because then I would have to confront the fact that I am a lazy bastard who would rather be kicked around by life while maintaining the illusion of cynical detachement than actually take a stand against unfairness."
Re:If the RIAA actually wants to make a statement (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Meh...welcome to Real Life (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a difference between being apathetic and choosing your battles. Am I upset that the CEO is showing blatant favoritism? Of course. Am I outraged to protest? Nope.
Let's just say that shouting and pointing fingers at how someone in power is using that power in unfair ways to minor effect (namely, if his kids got sued, they'd get the same "deal" as everyone else and the RIAA would make an additional $3,000 or so) is fairly unproductive.
Now, if I were someone who was being sued for downloading music, then I would have my lawyer get me off the hook on the technicality of the CEO's kids. That would serve two purposes: I would be free to go and make the RIAA pay my legal fees, and the matter would get very public attention (more so than Slashdot alone can provide).
On the other hand, if I'm sued for uploading music, that's a different story. He never claimed his kids were uploading music and it's fairly well-known that the RIAA doesn't really care about downloads if they can stop the uploaders there will be nothing left for others to download.
So again, you have to pick your fights and this is a very small one indeed to get too ruffled about. I'm much more concerned about corporate and political misbehaving that results in massive harm or damage to people in the U.S. and around the world. Everyone can take the high horse and say if they were king, they'd never bend the rules to help their own family and friends but most people would be lying when placed a real situation.
They Just Don't Get It (Score:3, Insightful)
Most people I know don't see much of a difference between using a P2P program to get a track which is how to get free music in the digital age and the method we used when we were younger, using a blank tape to record the good songs when they came on the radio. It's essentially the same thing, just quicker and more convenient.
I purchase new tracks on iTunes now because it's cheap, quick and easy but I can understand why many people avoid it due to DRM and the iPod lock in. If the RIAA would pull their heads out of their collective asses and offer music at a fair price with no DRM they'd have a huge winner on their hands. The music industry needs to recognize they can't sue their way out of this one and alienating you customers is a sure fire way to go out of business. Wise up and give the consumer what they want. Affordable music with no DRM that will work on any device they might choose to listen to it on. Would there still be piracy? Yes, but it wouldn't be anywhere near the level that it is at now. It would be prevalent among high school and college kids, but all one has to do is look at the alcohol industry to see how it's possible to get kids who are used to getting something for free when they are young to pony up for it when they are older and can afford to buy it.
Re:All people are equal (Score:5, Insightful)
This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law.
Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court
and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
o Life Line, 1939 - Robert Heinlein
Re:It's not stealing, it's just dishonest (Score:2, Insightful)
If I walk past someone on the sidewalk playing guitar, and I enjoy his playing, then throwing a couple bucks in his guitar case is a nice way to reward him for making my day more pleasurable and encourage him to keep playing... but I still don't owe it to him. It's voluntary. Why should a band be treated differently?
Re:All people are equal (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Meh...welcome to Real Life (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's not stealing, it's just dishonest (Score:3, Insightful)
Did we go and redefine socialist already? Because I don't think that word means what you think it means.
The most common complaints about the music biz are just the opposite. The commercialization of music, the willingness to do anything to make a buck, the aggressive marketing hype, the overpriced CDs, the glorification of bestselling multi-millionaires - none of these are notably socialist traits. These things are very much capitalism - make a product, market the hell out of it, get rich in the process. Artists who've got more money than they know what to do with are put on a pedestal. Where do you see socialism in popular music?
You could say the music industry is acting as a cartel and stifling real market competition. I'd buy that line of reasoning. But that isn't socialism, it's good old fashioned greed coupled with abuse of power.
Re:Meh...welcome to Real Life (Score:4, Insightful)
Should we march in the streets? Organize a letter writing campaign? Print out a copy of the article and FedEx it to someone who is on trial for illegal sharing of music to use as a defense and hope that the court won't notice that the CEO admitted that his kids downloaded rather than shared music? Maybe we, or as many of us as would fit, hide in his bushes until he leaves for work in the morning and hit him with the face with a pie?
I don't know, maybe all of them.
Or maybe none.
Maybe it won't matter because it is going to be difficult to get enough people together who are fired up enough over the moral inconsistency found in the children of an RIAA company CEO downloading music while the RIAA prosecutes people who share music. I would guess that you will have a hard time getting very many people to pay attention to you long enough to even explain the situation to them, and without a large number of people getting involved neither Warner nor the RIAA nor the AP is going to care. Not while they have actual atrocities to report.
The only thing that will get attention is the thing no one seems to be able to do: Stop buying what Warner sells. Despite all the dander that geeks get up over **AA antics they do not seem to be able to prevent themselves from consuming their content, either by pirating it or by standing in line to see their movies, buy their games, consoles, music, etc.
Re:Meh...welcome to Real Life (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:All people are equal (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course it is, since it is more convenient for you if it works that way.
Do you find not compensating artists for their work to be morally neutral as well?
Re:All people are equal (Score:4, Insightful)
The rest of us get to eat cake, it would seem.
Re:It's not stealing, it's just dishonest (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, I think the ubiquity of popular music coupled with the absurdly minimal costs of data copying today is what has lead people to feel entitled to music, if not free, then at least a lot cheaper then they can legally get it for. And really, can you blame us? The cost of an album hasn't really gone down for decades even though we can prove that one of the biggest costs to the music industry - distribution and physical media - has gone to nearly zero in the same period. That's the underlying problem the RIAA needs to address. People are on to their game and we aren't very happy about being manipulated into playing along.
Re:It's not stealing, it's just dishonest (Score:3, Insightful)
I like the works of Shakespeare. Do you think I should be obligated to pay his estate? I don't. This is not to say that I'm opposed to copyright; I'm for it, given the right circumstances and the right laws. But I disagree that people inherently owe artists anything merely because they created something. This morning, I walked past a bakery, and I enjoyed the smell of baking bread, but I'm not about to give them any money for it.
Let me deconstruct the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is that a few artists on Warner or Sony or Capital or whatever label are worth listening too. The artist creates the content that is entertaining. The labels just act like virtual pimps. Why should an artist suffer because their pimp is an assclown? I agree that boycotting a record label might seem like a good idea but we've been over the catch-22 before. They just assign the decline in sales to piracy and then enact legislation to fight this piracy hence hurting the consumer more. Don't be confused though. I am not saying we should do nothing. Awareness is the thing we need to concentrate on. Write your Senators and representatives. Talk to your non-technical friends about the ill will the RIAA generates. Email the parent companies of these record labels and tell them you think their involvement with the RIAA is despicable. And yes, email this story to anyone you know who is being sued or served a letter from the RIAA.
Re:All people are equal (Score:2, Insightful)
The point is, that without a license to copy, you cannot copy. Period. And you are stealing. Not butter or bread or houses, but intellectual property. The idea that copyright infringement is not in the same criminal code as theft, well, probably because of historical reasons. The two are equivalent. Furthermore, copyright infringement becomes more and more important as intellectual property becomes more key to the economy.
For example, I would not want my GPL code to be stolen by some hack in India or US or Europe. Yes, stolen. GPL is to remain GPL. That is the license. Similarly for other software. And the same thing applies to music. While I agree that musicians would probably benefit by selling music to public directly though Internet and allow (it is up to them! NOT you!) you to copy their intellectual property as a form of advertisement (or goodwill!). But that choice is with them, not you. You steal it, you should pay for the theft.
Anyone that disagrees with basic premise of copyright protection is the reason why companies and individuals waste resources to lock up their property with DRM. Congratulations!!
If you are completely clueless, think about intellectual property as a book. You buy the book. You CANNOT copy it verbatum and sell or or give it away. Period. You can share it, but when you have lent it, you DO NOT have access to it! You can share music, but you do not have access to it when someone else has access to it. "Sharing" it *through* copying is what is against the law.
Of course, this will get modded down by some yahoos that do not udnerstand more than l33t and h4x3r. They are also one of the major reason for DRM is here.
Re:All people are equal (Score:5, Insightful)
I assure you, the talkings-to I got as a kid did not go like that.
-Kurt
Re:All people are equal (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not disagreeing with that. The actual point of the original
If you are completely clueless
Ad homimen is admitting you have no meaningful point to make or things to say, and are just flinging insults in place of substantive discussion.
Re:All people are equal (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:hello?? - the guy runs a music label (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All people are equal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Meh...welcome to Real Life (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's not stealing, it's just dishonest (Score:4, Insightful)
The only difference is in the musicians' attitudes. One of them demands payment, the other hopes for donations; but in both cases, the music has already been performed by the time anyone makes a decision about paying for it, and if the listeners decide not to pay, they haven't taken anything away from the musicians. Listening for free has exactly the same consequences in both cases.
Now it's my turn to ask: do you honestly not see a difference?
Newspapers can only be in one place at a time. If I take a newspaper out of the box, that's one less newspaper that can be sold to someone else. If I take one, I have to compensate the owner for the loss of his newspaper. Music, on the other hand, cannot be taken away simply by listening to it or downloading it. You don't owe anyone compensation for listening to their song, because they still have everything they had before you heard it.
Now, if you can come up with a way to take a newspaper out of a box without reducing the number of newspapers in the box, then I'll reconsider my answer. I'll also nominate you for a Nobel Prize.
Re:All people are equal (Score:5, Insightful)
Are copyright extensions morally neutral? That sword cuts both ways.
Re:All people are equal (Score:4, Insightful)
Your observation about the porn industry is odd too, since they all *charge* for their content, (the ones that don't are supported by advertising revenue from the ones that do). It's true that they don't waste a lot of time chasing copyright violators, but that's probably because they can produce their content cheaply enough that they don't need to. They can make money on $10 a month subscriptions.
People who want all their content for free ignore the fact that it takes money to create content. How do you get around this basic issue?
Re:This Must Be Nearly A Record (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:All people are equal (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:All people are equal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All people are equal (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at Disney -- a large portion of their content is stolen from works that are now in the public domain. I know, I know, you can't "steal" from the public domain. Or can you? They're applying Microsoft's Embrace-Extend-Extinguish model to stories that were once free for anyone to read/tell.
The trick is that when you're dealing with intellectual property, people get rewarded for providing the information in an easy to consume form. Once the information is available, it becomes a lot harder to make money from providing it yet again. Many "content improvers" attempt to improve content they really can't afford to create by starting from something they got for nothing, thereby keeping costs within the amount they expect to recoup by improving that content. Then, to make a profit for those who lent them the money they're using to do this, they try to artificially limit how people can share their "improved" ideas.
Now for the other side:
American Entertainment is run on the debt-driven economy. This streamlines a lot of the areas required for wide-scale collaberation. Advertising is really a way of loaning money up front and expecting a return on investment down the line. So is producing a movie. If we switched to a profit-driven economy, consumers would have to pay the costs up front, and content creators would have to produce within that budget, leading to smaller budgets and consumers with a vested interest in seing a quality return on investment.
In short, we wouldn't see the kind of entertainment that the current regime is able to produce. We wouldn't see the production of experimental material either -- people would make what the consumer currently wanted, nothing more.
Funny thing is, due to the profit maximization required by investors, that's pretty much how it has turned out with this method too.
--end ramble.
Re:All people are equal (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:All people are equal (Score:3, Insightful)
The machine ends up costing $200,000,000 to finish, of course, so you are paying for the rest out of the $100 per transporter petty royalty.
Re:It's not stealing, it's just dishonest (Score:3, Insightful)
Want another interpretation? The music industry is unabashedly greedy. They screw over their customers and their artists, all while reaping enormous profits, and remaining free from legal consequence. This tells the public that "greed is good". So the public responds in kind.
The line of thinking is more like: "You want to gouge me 20 bucks for a DRM infested piece of plastic? I'd rather just download it. Greed works for those in the music biz, why not for me, the consumer?" What you call "entitlement mentality", others call "fighting fire with fire". There's nothing socialist about it.
I don't agree with this mentality myself. I've essentially stopped buying new music, and I don't pirate it either. This has nothing to do with any nebulous "judao-christian ethics" and everything to do with my own moral compass.
But calling the public mentality on file sharing "socialist" is utterly, utterly wrong; in reality it's the old idea of two wrongs making a right. It's responding to greed with greed. If you dislike greed, then by extension you have to look at both sides as being in the wrong (and the music industry far more so than the pirates).
Re:Meh...welcome to Real Life (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:All people are equal (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's not stealing, it's just dishonest (Score:3, Insightful)
Certainly a thief could think that. But then, the entire notion of property (beyond what you can personally maintain control of in a 'might makes right' sort of way) is artificial too. It's backed up by the idea of mutual respect for property (i.e. it behooves you to respect others' property in order to avoid having widespread disrespect for property that could work against you if others followed your lead) and organized systems to defend it (e.g. a police force, courts, prisons, etc. which follow certain rules with regard to property rights). So a would-be thief has to decide which is more in his interests: stealing or not. Generally the system is weighed to discourage the former and encourage the latter.
But none of this makes property rights generally any sort of an inherent right, just as copyrights are not an inherent right. It's all artificial. And it's all well and good, so long as it generally serves the public good. Of course, even in the world of real property, what ultimately serves the public good, and what is the law, may conflict with what uneducated sorts such as yourself, apparently, think about how things work. For example, if I had a plot of land, and someone came along and tried to take it from me, then the law will support that person under the right circumstances, the police will escort me off of what I might still think of as my own land, etc.
Honestly, how you can misread my posts all the time is beyond me. I've never said I was against the idea of copyright, or against particular implementations of it. I'm just debunking the silly idea that authors are naturally entitled to copyrights or naturally have copyrights. The truth is that they only get copyrights at all when it serves the public interest to give them copyrights, and this will not always be the case, either for copyrights generally or a specific degree of copyright compared with another.
A is A (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking in tautologies is one of the surest indicators that what's being said is dogma/indoctrination rather than reason.