Lester Chambers, Screwed Over For Decades By The Recording Industry, Goes Direct Via Kickstarter
from the with-help-from-alexis-ohanian dept
Earlier this year, a picture posted online by musician Lester Chambers of the Chambers Brothers -- a successful act from the 1960s -- went viral, telling the story of how the recording industry never paid him money he was owed.
The music industry may have screwed Lester Chambers for decades, but we the internet public can right their wrong.
Thanks to the open internet (things we fought for against SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, etc.), sites like Kickstarter and other innovations that are being worked on by entrepreneurs right now, we have the opportunity to do right by artists and cut out those who'd mistreat them. We have the opportunity to create solutions that will support artists in the digital world.
In looking over this, I'm reminded that earlier this year, during a debate with Jonathan Taplin, Alexis similarly offered to help struggling career musicians launch Kickstarter campaigns, and was mocked for his offer. It raises questions, yet again, as to who is actually helping musicians out these days? The people whining about how copyright laws must be enforced... or the people actually setting up and creating new services to help musicians make money?
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Filed Under: alexis ohanian, crowdfunding, lester chambers
Companies: breadpig, kickstarter
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Tell me again who the dirty pirate is?
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MAFIAA are a bunch of Assholes who need to die.
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if he had been treated as he should have been by the labels, we shouldn't have to do this. if all the bull shit that they put out was true, it would be a different story, but it isn't. so why, when there is evidence like this in front of their eyes, do politicians ignore it, immediately condemn these people as wasters or worse and go straight to the 'let's make another law to protect the industries' room? pathetic!!
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It is disgusting, but they can get away with it simply by choosing the right microphone holders among journalists.
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Maybe it's time to switch back to your other meme: "they already have enough money". Except the ones that don't.
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There. I FTFY to show your stupid ass how you can say the same thing about anyone, anywhere.
Now, let's see if you've got the berries to go steal something besides music. Pussy douchebag.
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Thanks for the laugh there, really.
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LOL, no you didn't. At all.
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The problem is that most artists cannot afford to take labels to court, otherwise you'd see it happen a lot more often.
Labels cheat artists out of due pay and get away with it all the time, yet a little girl who downloads a song on her Winnie The Pooh laptop prompts the feds to bust into her home. Our justice system is so blatantly biased towards the elites that it's sickening.
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What I did was referencing what was said pretty fair. I then commented on said reference. Both things completely after the book of journalism.
What I called disgusting is how they can go from denouncing what happened to him and then to use him as an example for what happens when you do not pay for music. The coupling is ironic/moronic since what has happened is that the guy has been cheated out of royalties by his label and not the listeners. The real problem is that cutting out the record label and donating directly to the artist was in no way possible at the time. Any decent journalist should have been able to catch that ball.
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LOL
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It's amazing that people like yourself will still attack Mike even of reports of the music industry ripped off the same people it pretends to protect, but I'll forgive people like you for not having the intellectual capacity to see this. It just amazes me that you'll attack someone for a potential, unproven, potential sale but not similarly attack those who directly rip off artists from real, collected income.
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Do you know what label ripped Lester off?
Do you know for a fact that all labels rip off artists?
The answer of course is no.
You choose to use an ugly example to paint everyone with a broad brush and then use that as a justification for piracy.
You're a joke.
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Yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_Chambers is a good place to start, and it's been written about many times if you're intellectually honest enough to read about a subject before attacking other peoples' knowledge of it - which of you're not.
"Do you know for a fact that all labels rip off artists?"
No, nor have I claimed such a thing.
"You choose to use an ugly example to paint everyone with a broad brush and then use that as a justification for piracy."
Yet again, you lie about me because you can't address my real opinions and positions. Pathetic.
"You're a joke."
You're the one lying your ass off and attacking fantasies.
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You mean like you calling anyone a pirate who thinks the labbels suck?
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I hate that I'm broke right now, but you know what I'll get paid at least once before the Kickstarter project ends. Opportunity to hear a new album from Lester whose shown he can deliver? Hell yes! I will totally drop some cash for that.
As for the bobs/OotBs of the world, you can get bent as far as your $100 million movie goes. But I for one can't wait to see you dismiss/hand wave this article/Kickstarter project. An artist truly and royally screwed over by YOUR kind of people being "forced" to turn to the internet and my kind for help. I bet that just galls you guys. But if me and my kind are the "pirates" and bad guys, what are you and yours (the ones who've taken every opportunity to avoid NOT paying royalties to Lester Chambers)?
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I might be a dirty pirate...
and it was more than 10 bucks.
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Happy Birthday
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copyright changes
Then secondly everyone has the right to download any content for personal use free of charge, everyone.
Let the artists get there work out there and spread around the world, then if they want to make a new album just go to a kick-start like site just for musicians.
If anything most of the money will go to the artist and be used to create content and pay them a fair amount, if they are popular enough, if not then they need to look into another career.
Lets get rid of the greedy monopoly that is in fact doing everything they can to grab as much of the artists money for themselves as they can. I for one would love to donate towards a campaign to take the offending studio and collection societies to court, this man worked hard and they made all the money, that is just not fair and copyright law must be changed to stop this now!!!!
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Re: copyright changes
Too many artists are being screwed over by record labels and their brainwashing bullshit about how they will never 'make it' without them.
What does 'make it' even mean? In my mind, it means having as many people as possible listening to their music while making a good, honest living (not millions). That can be done without the aid of monopolist record labels whose only concern is making as much money as possible and as quickly as possible. They do not give two shites about culture.
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I'd rather give money...
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Lester is Ungrateful
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Re: Lester is Ungrateful
[tips hat]
Well done, sir. Well done.
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Re: Lester is Ungrateful
I think the music industry must put Lester up as a symbol that we need to strenghten copyright laws even more, so that we can finally recoup our money and start paying artists like Lester.
To all you people who say that copyright laws are too strong and that we should abolish copyright... Your stand is making artist like Lester suffer!
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Clear conscience...
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Re: Clear conscience...
I don't know whether there is a right to own the ideas you've invented, or not, but because of the realities of digital copying, I am sure that supply chains will look very different in the future.
Artists will distribute their work with the help of firms that never own the work but only provide services. At worst they will take a clearly visible cut like Apple Store. Classical middlemen will all but disappear. Artists on the whole may stay poor, as they are now, despite the optimism on Techdirt, but there will be more art. Personalities, not artists as such, but hustling, savvy artists, will be the big winners. Not just bigger celebrities but more of them.
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All it took to change my mind was somebody asking me "just why exactly should the whole world give up so much liberty simply because of the assumption, based on no evidence whatsoever, that copyright is the only way to solve the free rider problem for funding artists?". I did not have a clever answer to this, and it caused me to reconsider a lot of things indeed. I had read 1984 recently and I knew that the consequences of what copyright was really asking for were to be innately distrusted. Indeed, the country that ironically no doubt has the lowest levels of piracy in the world right now is North Korea. You can use that as a powerful comeback towards anyone who tries to passive-aggressively slander copyright abolitionists with the claim that China's "Communistic" ideology, as opposed to North Korea's Communistic ideology, causes 80% of the world's piracy (the reason for this rate - assuming that the rate is not so high simply because of China's high population - is because China blocks free trade especially when it comes to iTunes and other services, forcing people to pirate and hide under the country's strict trade and free speech laws... sounds like a certain industry that tries to make content as unavailable as possible, doesn't it?) It is no different to the "Hitler was an atheist!" slander I get in religious debates.
And speaking of 1984 and the piracy in China caused by trade blockades, I have heard of some stories about the Soviet Union's underground opposition. People would pass around pirated copies of 1984 (and Animal Farm, too) to read and copy for one another. They had to be pirated because the Soviet Union, just like China, would not tolerate any trade from the West, which meant very few printing presses. The proles would keep any notice of 1984 copies being passed around off the record, and would give them an instinctive knowledge that would help them ease the difficult fall of the Soviet Union. So my question to any copyright maximalist/apologist is this: should the publishers of 1984 or George Orwell himself (I can guess HIS answer to this question) have been in a position to forbid the proles from obtaining such important literature for their resistance simply because they were not in a position, let alone any kind of liberty at all, to reward the author for his works? The implications are important - copyright economics at their very core have more Communistic potential than non-copyright economics. They must do, because copyright by its definition restricts trade.
I must say, reading the sign by Lester Chambers made me angry. It sums up everything about what is so horrible about copyright: eventually the buck of power gets passed to an unwelcome party who can overrule an artist's rights on his own works, even although that party took no part whatsoever in the creative process. I have similar rage over what I heard about EMI preventing the Beatles from letting Carl Sagan use "Here Comes The Sun" for his Voyager Golden Record project.
This is tyranny by the way. There is no other way to describe it. A gross accumulation of power that reveals the worst possible aspects of unchallenged corporatism. These labels do not just have "a" monopoly - they have numerous monopolies consisting of every artist who ever signed with them. The concept of self-publishing or even self-management will never truly have a fair shot against this. These labels will always have unjust power as long as copyright exists, and have the ability to crush random innocent people in a "Go Postal!", draconian fashion by bankrupting anyone who does the equivalent of letting their friends borrow DVDs over the internet.
People who laugh at this common sense... people who insist that this transparent stupidity is the best thing possible for both creators and audiences, and that anyone who even asks gentle questions about it are on par with car thieves and terrorists are just flippant. I cannot tell you how finished I am with people who talk like that. How fucking sick and tired I am of their absolute refusal to accept responsibility for the dangers that copyright poses to modern communication technology and, indeed, creativity as a whole.
Anything done in the name of copyright is okay, apparently. I hear that attempting to restore French Colonialism in Vietnam was justified in the name of fighting Communism, too.
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I'm in
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Argh
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