Canadian Copyright Collective Calls It A Day After 15 Years Of Failing To Make Payments To Rights Holders
from the taking-down-the-industry-from-the-inside dept
Organizations fronting for rights holders repeatedly claim to have the best interests of those they represent at heart, but in reality, their efforts are largely self-serving. Lobbying, lawsuits and the pursuit of nominal fees through legislation is expensive work. The theory is that the monies collected by these efforts will make its way to rights holders, but as we've seen time and time again, the collected funds are either dumped back into the vicious circle of lawsuits/lobbying or disbursed to those running these agencies. Very rarely do creators see any sort of payment from these efforts, and the few that do are usually making healthy incomes already (the top 5%).
Michael Geist details the decade-plus of failure of one of these agencies. The Educational Rights Collective Canada (ERCC) was formed in 1988 1998 for the sole purpose of collecting royalties for the educational copying of broadcast programs for the classroom. Fifteen years down the road, it's asking the Copyright Board of Canada to put it out of its misery.
The ERCC, which includes the CBC as a founding member, asks the Copyright Board to effectively put an end to its tariff as it admits that it has never distributed any money to rights holders and is hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.Fifteen years of pushing for tariffs and not a single cent was passed on to the creators. During this same period, the ERCC managed to rack up nearly $1 million in debt. Its creditors are expecting to collect no more than 5% of the outstanding debt, most of which the ERCC amassed in its quest to institute copying tariffs. Canada's new copyright bill, C-11, greatly expands the royalty-free copying educational institutes can do, eliminating the ERCC's reason to exist.
The debt will now be absorbed by its creditors and the ERCC's clientele find themselves in the same financial position they were in 15 years ago. Rights holders should be taking a long, hard look at the institutions supposedly representing their interests. Many of these continue to throw good money after bad in hopes of extracting fees for nearly every use of copyrighted material. The purpose these organizations are supposed to serve -- divesting funds to rights holders -- seems to fall very low on the list of priorities.
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Filed Under: canada, collections, copyright
Companies: ercc
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Crystal clear
1) Artists aren't paid based on their work or efforts, but labels are entitled to the money
2) Every collection agency works to say that copyright can pay them, but the screw over the artists.
3) The creativity in copyright comes in the licensing portion where the artist lose more money which the copyright holder gains.
4) This is supposedly a better system over the last 40 years than reducing copyright terms to 0 minutes and having artists decide how to promote themselves based on new avenues of revenue and diverse platforms to express themselves.
The only real theft going on is that of the copyright holder in exploiting the artist and stealing their innovative works.
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Pedantic Math error
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10,100 elementary
3,400 secondary
2,000& mixed elementary and secondary
Enforcement would be no joke.
Sounds like a lot of work to talk to that many institutions at least once a year (that is being very conservative). Without seeing the books, I don't know.
1 million dollars over ten years = 100,000 dollars a year
lets say a staff of 4 at an annual salary of 20,000= 80,000
lets add rent, electricity, business expenses etc. That could easily eat 20 grand in a year.seems pretty easy to see how they could be 1 mil in debt...
or
they could be stealing all the money they collected for only nefarious and under handed reasons.........
My bet would be a mixture of both.
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Getting the obvious question out of the way:
What exactly happened to all that money they were collecting?
I can only think of two possibly explanations for something like that, either the group was seriously corrupt, shifting the collected funds to other people/groups(like say, themselves), or they were so incompetent that every single one of them would have failed the most basic economics class, and were such abysmal failures at handling money that they'd have been unsuitable to run a lemonade stand.
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To me, it sounds more like the same problem as DRM: You use a large amount of resources to fight a problem with far too little positive impact to pay for itself (or, in some cases, even pay for the hit to reputation)!
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Re: Getting the obvious question out of the way:
-Criminally misrepresenting themselves (by failing to pay a single cent to the people they claimed to represent)
-Extortion/theft of money that didn't belong to them in the first place. (How much money in royalties/settlements was paid to them that was intended to go to the authors of the actual content?)
-Possibly part of their mismanagement that got them so badly in debt is that some of the money was being stolen/embezzled. (That deep in debt while failing to pay a single cent to the rights holders says their financial books need a close look at)
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Hmm
.....
.....
?
Where's OOTB?
Ah a note from the RIAA/MPAA:
"It is policy that paid shills for the RIAA/MPAA are given non-paid holiday days off. OOTB will return to his regulary scheduled nonsense next week. Enjoy a non-trolled week and a prosperous New Year."
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think of the children
So budget to teach children has X + Y dollars trimed off, now the collection agency goes belly up owing even more.
white collar crime, no penalties.
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Answer me this, copyright shitrolls.
Why would I pay money to support the artist, only for the artist to not get the money, and when that happens, I get called a pirate because the artist isn't seeing a significant profit from the venture?
Why would anyone pay for the privilege to be called a pirate?
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Collection agency economics
Collection agency economics is sort of like having solar panels indoors, lit by lights shining on the panels. These lights get power from the panels.
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Shell Game.
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A message to Vendors who sell to collection societies
Either don't do business with them, or only do business on a cash basis.
This one going bankrupt and sticking you with at least 95% of the bill should be a lesson.
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But then, there's not an everyday good of copyright, is there?
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