Sound Exchange collects stray digital income and splits it 50/50 between band & label (that's the simplest explanation). One fascinating detail that flies in the face of its RIAA/Congressional origins is that the band/artist income CANNOT be paid to the label, no matter how much $ the band/artist owes the label- or how much the label CLAIMS the band/artist owes.
That's a huge deal, even though it hurts us a bit when a band who's legitimately in the hole to us for $2000 gets $500 that, if it were collected properly, we the label would apply to their $2000 debt. All we can do (and I do this) is ask the band nicely to pay us the $ to knock down their debt. But the fact that labels cannot talk their way into rightfully or wrongfully being paid their artists income is a big change.
Sound Exchange has astonished me with their good moves over the past year or so. Their "Artist Side" (the department that handles payment directly to bands) has been peppering me with requests for contact information for a host of bands whom we love but we had no idea anyone else did. I'm talking bands that were brief highlights of the underground who broke up in 1999 or 2003 or whatever. I've put them in touch with ex-band members and let them take it from there.
Sound Exchange is also readying a payment to our label. I have no idea how much it will be. The downside is that although we've been registered apparently for years, we were actually registered by an ex-business partner who has been collecting our share for a few years. Apparently SoundExchange will be paying us our back royalties and deducting the difference from the ex-business partner's other SoundExchange-registered companies. The resolution of this kerfluffle was quick on Sound Exchange's side & I appreciate that a lot!
As for the news covered by this post- I'm agnostic. Why would I want to chase after multiple sources of the same pool of digital income if I can get it all in one place? After all, this is $ that none of us previously knew existed. I think I'm not alone in thinking of this- wrongly, I know- as "free" money.
Wouldn't bands have to register w/ Sirius as well as with Sound Exchange? Judging from the pokiness of band members (myself included) that's not gonna happen & Sirius would be able to sit on the band side of the royalties until a band got its crap together enough to register through Sirius too.
Also, Sirius is only 1 digital source of Sound Exchange income. A savvy label/band would still need to be registered w/ Sound Exchange to get income from the other sources.
The one thing I don't agree with is the, "Let it all blow up!" approach. Look, someone out there charged customers money for songs, collected it, and now a portion of that $ is actually (gasp!) going to the bands & the labels who own or license those songs. To allow that someone who charged for songs to keep that $ without paying the bands/labels involved is just what Techdirt regulars complain about when overseas Performance Rights Organizations do- remember that article from last month about that?
I loved that movie (& I think it's referred to in the blog post above).
Well, "loved" as in got really pissed off. Then "loved" as in "I'm over 21 so I can watch whatever I want, even more so because I can order films from around the planet!"
Still, it shows the MPAA ratings system to be as broken and messed up as we all thought it is, and is a shining example of how NOT to run a ratings system.
We in the music industry faced that in the 80s w/ the PMRC. My employer, Jello Biafra, was knee-deep in the fight against them, along with Dee Snider & Frank Zappa. We fought and won the "Frankenchrist" trial in 1986-87.
Synch & masters, artistic & mechanicals, and digital income
A couple things- like some others here, I deal with these issues all the time. I have a semi-large quibble w/ this article although the thrust of it- big companies behaving badly- is clearly accurate.
Quibble #1:
From reading the more in-depth blog post that this references, it's unclear how much of this affects artists who have a label working their music, whether independent or major. I have a feeling that a lot of this doesn't apply to those artists. I think this is more about the literally independent artist, not artists on independent labels not represented by the RIAA.
For licensing games, movies, commercials, whatever, you *should* get both a synch right & a master right. I believe this is analogous to both artistic royalties & mechanical royalties. As I read those articles, the synch right and the mechanical royalty are analogous to both the public performance & reproduction rights that are discussed above, since they relate to the payment of mechanical royalties to songwriters.
HOWEVER, a company that wants to license a song is coming from OUTSIDE the artist-label relationship. A distributor or store (whether physical or digital) is from INSIDE the artist-label relationship.
That leads me to Quibble #1:
A song is distributed to a digital retailer by a distributor. That distributor able to do this because it has an agreement with a record label. The record label is able to do this because it has an agreement with the artist. This label-artist agreement is where the mechanical & artistic rights are assigned to the label. The label can then push the music out along the various sales channels. All of this is INSIDE the artist-label relationship. Additionally, because of the compulsory licensing under US law, there's only one digital license needed by digital retailers (a Reproduction license), and that's included within the artist-label relationship (implied or explicitly included, btw). If the other links in the chain are lined up, an artist cannot refuse a license for the US digital retailer to sell the work.
So digital retailers inside the US aren't involved at all in this story. Frankly, that's where the majority of income for US-based independent artists comes from, no matter who you are.
I understand the point that legally, for some reason, there's 2 licenses needed for overseas digital sales. And since only the Reproduction one is compulsory (i.e. an artist cannot refuse to allow a retailer to sell a track under this license), the OTHER one has to be agreed to by the artist. (Is this an example of legal overreach, like the DMCA, back when the internet was going to be printing money so it was okay to demand ridiculous fees from anything digital?)
Leaving aside that it makes no sense to have a 2nd license since this is NOT an OUTSIDE relationship (i.e. it's part of the sales chain that goes artist--> label--> distributor--> retail), I think Techdirt readers should step back and understand what this article is demanding.
It's demanding that all non-US digital stores (as opposed to physical stores) get explicit permission from each rights-holder to sell a product that they, if they were in the US, would automatically be able to sell by being associated with the artist's distributor. While in the world of data and numbers the trading of information and permission is lightning fast, here we're talking about my people. Artists. Band members. People who aren't computer-compatible. People who are on tour. People who aren't paying attention. Dollars to donuts says that's why the right to Reproduction is a compulsory license, ha ha ha...
That's crazy, but it's a small quibble.
Quibble #3:
Digital royalties famously don't come divided between mechanicals & artistic royalties. The linked article claims that standard practice is that when digital income comes in, it is all artistic royalties and the label pays the mechanicals out of its share. Maybe it's because we're not in the RIAA & we don't get their newsletters, but I've never heard of this, ha ha ha...
As is industry standard, digital sales are treated differently than physical sales. They're treated as licenses (hence the bits about compulsory licenses above) and therefore the standard is 50% label, 50% artist. I think it was Eminem who sued his label because they were treating digital sales as "sales", in otherwords paying him 10-14% instead of 50%. (His label has brass fucking balls to do that!)
We (& every other label I know of) split digital 50/50. The artist's 50% is split into artistic & mechanical if necessary (if a band is splitting everything equally & there are no covers, it's just extra work to split it into artistic & mechanical).
Quibble #4:
If we have to split the digital into mechanical & artistic, we have no real guide. As noted, there's no hard and fast % split. *** THIS ISN'T BECAUSE LABELS ARE EVIL!!! ****
This is because mechanicals are tied to a specific amount of money ($.091 cents/song) while artistic royalties are tied to a specific % of a sales price (either list price or wholesale price), and a record may have 5 songs ($.45 of mechanicals) & sell for $9.98, or it may have 10 songs ($.91/mechanicals) & sell for $9.98.
Here, we split each batch of digital royalties at the same ratio of the physical sales. So if the band is making 20% mechanicals & 80% artistic on their physical sales, then we apply the same ratio to their digital sales.
QUESTION:
Are these overseas digital royalties part of what Sound Exchange is supposed to be vaccuuming up & distributing 50/50 to the label & to the artist? If so, Sound Exchange has been very active and refuses to pay labels any of the artist's income, even when the artist is legitimately in debt to the label. Trust me, we know this through direct experience. I'm both a band member and a label owner, so it's awesome and awful at the same time, but I don't begrudge the system too much because it has been tilted against the artist almost since day one.
For example, as an artist, I'm stoked because my old label (that's now almost bankrupt) can't come after my Sound Exchange income even though we left the label owing them $2K. As a label manager, I'm bummed because a band that owes us $4K is getting $500 that we could really use to pay down what they owe us. I have to (and am) talking w/ bands who owe us $ and trying to persuade them to pay down their debt with their Sound Exchange money. If they refuse, there's nothing we can do.
======= That said, I am appalled by the chicanery of the big boys, taking $ for artists that they don't represent and keeping it. They've tried to pull this kind of stuff in the late 1990s, even though they do not represent the majority of artists nor does their industry group, the RIAA, represent the majority of labels. Brass fucking balls.
If a contract is not being lived up to, then the signers have an option to terminate if the contract is not fulfilled.
A lot of times music contracts have a last-chance clause, along the lines of "if the terms aren't being fulfilled, then the parties have 30 days after written notice of breach of contract to correct the breach" and then after that time period, the rights revert to the artist/licensor.
Our contracts have something like this, and I cannot imagine that Victory, who are a much larger, more business-like label, don't have the same or stronger language.
I've been a volunteer & DJ @ KALX Berkeley for 20+ years. I can tell you first-hand that the insanity around this Board, the rates, and the DMCA in general has forced stations to either highly restrict programming based on what format it comes in or to probably break the law.
The higher costs for college and community stations to stay current with the DMCA reporting requirements also don't help at all in times of collegiate budget cuts/colleges selling off their stations.
Why is this important? Because while a lot of people are plugged in 24/7, the radio is accessible from everywhere- smart phone, car, home- and community/college stations are open enough where young bands/unknown bands/artists/local activists/politicians can all easily access a broad audience.
So best of luck to this suit. I think the Librarian has been generally receptive to community station concerns, but it's still a weird, obstructive construct that came about when, in 1998, it was obvious to Congress that if one broadcast on-line, one would be raking in mega-money (ha ha ha ha).
Re: Re: Re: Not copyfraud... @ "Paul Renault": Think "MC" on the graphic
If you're talking about the image above, the MC is definitely part of the Hell's Angels logo.
One obvious proof of this is that the font is the same as "Hell's Angels." Why would an organization alter their trademark notice to match the font of an outside logo?
Back when I was the head booker for a local punk club, ASCAP hunted us down and we had one face-to-face meeting with them.
We basically said all of the things that the restaurant owner (and many of you have said) and ASCAP's response was, "It doesn't matter what songs you actually play, it's based on the square footage. All of this has been legally proven in court so you cannot fight the precedent we've won over the years."
We ended up filing all future letters (some VERY scary legal ones included) in the circular file and stopped returning their phone calls. Since they don't work at night, we never saw them again and we never paid them a cent. About 10 years later, BMI tried a similar campaign and never even got as far as a face-to-face.
As a BMI artist for many years, I personally have never seen a cent from them. Of course, I have nothing in a commercial or on a major label. The most I've sold of a particular record is around 30,000, which is GREAT for punk rock but generally avoided the stores that use Soundscan, commercial radio, and other methods that BMI & the other performing rights organizations use to get their payout information.
As a college radio DJ for almost 20 years, we have an annual BMI week where we write down publishing information for all of the songs we play during that week. BMI allegedly factors that information into their payouts too. Another DJ's friend was at BMI for years and swears that they don't pay attention to their college radio surveys, but that's second-hand so take it with a grain of salt.
So yeah- if you've got a song that's in a commercial situation, you may get paid from BMI. If not, it's only good "just in case" and to lay claim to your own creation (or shared creation, in the case of most rock bands) for whatever the publishing term is.
1. Here's another reason why federal law controls the use of private mailboxes.
It is illegal to place election material inside of a mailbox (unless it's actually mailed). That's why campaigns that are following the law will instruct canvassing volunteers to bow the paper and put it between the doorjamb & the door knob, or slid it under the side of a mailbox, or do basically anything besides physically opening the mailbox & inserting election material.
2. I think a lot of this ignores the root problem. Yes, some overofficious USPS employee is going overboard, BUT why is the USPS in this position? Because the Congress has mandated that they pay ahead the next 70 years of benefits over the next couple of years. This blew a ginormous hole in their budget.
Adding to that is the Republicans insistence on the USPS paying for itself. That makes sense if its a private business, but the mail is a public service with responsibilities of ensuring communication access to all addresses, no matter what, that private companies are not bound to.
Imagine if public transit had to pay for itse- oh wait, no wonder there's always service cuts and price hikes. Or imagine if FIRE DEPARTMENTS had to pay for themselves? Thankfully, we're not there yet in the US, but it's only a matter of time... unless we as a country smarten up.
"When dealing with corporate copyright permissions, all such permissions are in writing. This creates a paper trail, which ICE has repeatedly claimed does not exist."
Even for the lowliest independent film, there are usually a fair amount of agreements for master & sync rights for music.
I can't IMAGINE what a US government agency would produce in terms of a paper trail for use of a piece of film produced and used by a private corporation. It'd be a battle of red tape back and forth!
On the post: SoundExchange & A2IM Sued For Antitrust Violations By Sirius
Re: Re: A reaction from the trenches
Yeah, I'm a geek.
On the post: SoundExchange & A2IM Sued For Antitrust Violations By Sirius
Re: Sound Exchange is Robbing Everyone!!!!
On the post: SoundExchange & A2IM Sued For Antitrust Violations By Sirius
A reaction from the trenches
Sound Exchange collects stray digital income and splits it 50/50 between band & label (that's the simplest explanation). One fascinating detail that flies in the face of its RIAA/Congressional origins is that the band/artist income CANNOT be paid to the label, no matter how much $ the band/artist owes the label- or how much the label CLAIMS the band/artist owes.
That's a huge deal, even though it hurts us a bit when a band who's legitimately in the hole to us for $2000 gets $500 that, if it were collected properly, we the label would apply to their $2000 debt. All we can do (and I do this) is ask the band nicely to pay us the $ to knock down their debt. But the fact that labels cannot talk their way into rightfully or wrongfully being paid their artists income is a big change.
Sound Exchange has astonished me with their good moves over the past year or so. Their "Artist Side" (the department that handles payment directly to bands) has been peppering me with requests for contact information for a host of bands whom we love but we had no idea anyone else did. I'm talking bands that were brief highlights of the underground who broke up in 1999 or 2003 or whatever. I've put them in touch with ex-band members and let them take it from there.
Sound Exchange is also readying a payment to our label. I have no idea how much it will be. The downside is that although we've been registered apparently for years, we were actually registered by an ex-business partner who has been collecting our share for a few years. Apparently SoundExchange will be paying us our back royalties and deducting the difference from the ex-business partner's other SoundExchange-registered companies. The resolution of this kerfluffle was quick on Sound Exchange's side & I appreciate that a lot!
As for the news covered by this post- I'm agnostic. Why would I want to chase after multiple sources of the same pool of digital income if I can get it all in one place? After all, this is $ that none of us previously knew existed. I think I'm not alone in thinking of this- wrongly, I know- as "free" money.
Wouldn't bands have to register w/ Sirius as well as with Sound Exchange? Judging from the pokiness of band members (myself included) that's not gonna happen & Sirius would be able to sit on the band side of the royalties until a band got its crap together enough to register through Sirius too.
Also, Sirius is only 1 digital source of Sound Exchange income. A savvy label/band would still need to be registered w/ Sound Exchange to get income from the other sources.
The one thing I don't agree with is the, "Let it all blow up!" approach. Look, someone out there charged customers money for songs, collected it, and now a portion of that $ is actually (gasp!) going to the bands & the labels who own or license those songs. To allow that someone who charged for songs to keep that $ without paying the bands/labels involved is just what Techdirt regulars complain about when overseas Performance Rights Organizations do- remember that article from last month about that?
On the post: AMC Defies MPAA Bullies: Will Show Unrated Documentary To Kids With Permission Slips
Re: Everybody should see....
Well, "loved" as in got really pissed off. Then "loved" as in "I'm over 21 so I can watch whatever I want, even more so because I can order films from around the planet!"
Still, it shows the MPAA ratings system to be as broken and messed up as we all thought it is, and is a shining example of how NOT to run a ratings system.
We in the music industry faced that in the 80s w/ the PMRC. My employer, Jello Biafra, was knee-deep in the fight against them, along with Dee Snider & Frank Zappa. We fought and won the "Frankenchrist" trial in 1986-87.
On the post: How Big Music Companies Are Stealing Hundreds Of Millions In Royalties From Artists
Synch & masters, artistic & mechanicals, and digital income
Quibble #1:
From reading the more in-depth blog post that this references, it's unclear how much of this affects artists who have a label working their music, whether independent or major. I have a feeling that a lot of this doesn't apply to those artists. I think this is more about the literally independent artist, not artists on independent labels not represented by the RIAA.
For licensing games, movies, commercials, whatever, you *should* get both a synch right & a master right. I believe this is analogous to both artistic royalties & mechanical royalties. As I read those articles, the synch right and the mechanical royalty are analogous to both the public performance & reproduction rights that are discussed above, since they relate to the payment of mechanical royalties to songwriters.
HOWEVER, a company that wants to license a song is coming from OUTSIDE the artist-label relationship. A distributor or store (whether physical or digital) is from INSIDE the artist-label relationship.
That leads me to Quibble #1:
A song is distributed to a digital retailer by a distributor. That distributor able to do this because it has an agreement with a record label. The record label is able to do this because it has an agreement with the artist. This label-artist agreement is where the mechanical & artistic rights are assigned to the label. The label can then push the music out along the various sales channels. All of this is INSIDE the artist-label relationship. Additionally, because of the compulsory licensing under US law, there's only one digital license needed by digital retailers (a Reproduction license), and that's included within the artist-label relationship (implied or explicitly included, btw). If the other links in the chain are lined up, an artist cannot refuse a license for the US digital retailer to sell the work.
So digital retailers inside the US aren't involved at all in this story. Frankly, that's where the majority of income for US-based independent artists comes from, no matter who you are.
I understand the point that legally, for some reason, there's 2 licenses needed for overseas digital sales. And since only the Reproduction one is compulsory (i.e. an artist cannot refuse to allow a retailer to sell a track under this license), the OTHER one has to be agreed to by the artist. (Is this an example of legal overreach, like the DMCA, back when the internet was going to be printing money so it was okay to demand ridiculous fees from anything digital?)
Leaving aside that it makes no sense to have a 2nd license since this is NOT an OUTSIDE relationship (i.e. it's part of the sales chain that goes artist--> label--> distributor--> retail), I think Techdirt readers should step back and understand what this article is demanding.
It's demanding that all non-US digital stores (as opposed to physical stores) get explicit permission from each rights-holder to sell a product that they, if they were in the US, would automatically be able to sell by being associated with the artist's distributor. While in the world of data and numbers the trading of information and permission is lightning fast, here we're talking about my people. Artists. Band members. People who aren't computer-compatible. People who are on tour. People who aren't paying attention. Dollars to donuts says that's why the right to Reproduction is a compulsory license, ha ha ha...
That's crazy, but it's a small quibble.
Quibble #3:
Digital royalties famously don't come divided between mechanicals & artistic royalties. The linked article claims that standard practice is that when digital income comes in, it is all artistic royalties and the label pays the mechanicals out of its share. Maybe it's because we're not in the RIAA & we don't get their newsletters, but I've never heard of this, ha ha ha...
As is industry standard, digital sales are treated differently than physical sales. They're treated as licenses (hence the bits about compulsory licenses above) and therefore the standard is 50% label, 50% artist. I think it was Eminem who sued his label because they were treating digital sales as "sales", in otherwords paying him 10-14% instead of 50%. (His label has brass fucking balls to do that!)
We (& every other label I know of) split digital 50/50. The artist's 50% is split into artistic & mechanical if necessary (if a band is splitting everything equally & there are no covers, it's just extra work to split it into artistic & mechanical).
Quibble #4:
If we have to split the digital into mechanical & artistic, we have no real guide. As noted, there's no hard and fast % split. *** THIS ISN'T BECAUSE LABELS ARE EVIL!!! ****
This is because mechanicals are tied to a specific amount of money ($.091 cents/song) while artistic royalties are tied to a specific % of a sales price (either list price or wholesale price), and a record may have 5 songs ($.45 of mechanicals) & sell for $9.98, or it may have 10 songs ($.91/mechanicals) & sell for $9.98.
Here, we split each batch of digital royalties at the same ratio of the physical sales. So if the band is making 20% mechanicals & 80% artistic on their physical sales, then we apply the same ratio to their digital sales.
QUESTION:
Are these overseas digital royalties part of what Sound Exchange is supposed to be vaccuuming up & distributing 50/50 to the label & to the artist? If so, Sound Exchange has been very active and refuses to pay labels any of the artist's income, even when the artist is legitimately in debt to the label. Trust me, we know this through direct experience. I'm both a band member and a label owner, so it's awesome and awful at the same time, but I don't begrudge the system too much because it has been tilted against the artist almost since day one.
For example, as an artist, I'm stoked because my old label (that's now almost bankrupt) can't come after my Sound Exchange income even though we left the label owing them $2K. As a label manager, I'm bummed because a band that owes us $4K is getting $500 that we could really use to pay down what they owe us. I have to (and am) talking w/ bands who owe us $ and trying to persuade them to pay down their debt with their Sound Exchange money. If they refuse, there's nothing we can do.
======= That said, I am appalled by the chicanery of the big boys, taking $ for artists that they don't represent and keeping it. They've tried to pull this kind of stuff in the late 1990s, even though they do not represent the majority of artists nor does their industry group, the RIAA, represent the majority of labels. Brass fucking balls.
On the post: How Big Music Companies Are Stealing Hundreds Of Millions In Royalties From Artists
Re: Re: Let me take it, frame by frame it:
Considering the pap that the major studios and labels churn out, I would frankly love this.
That's just an aside- I couldn't resist!
On the post: Band Tells Fans To Boycott Its Albums, Saying Its Label Doesn't Pay
Re: Re: Here's an idea...
If a contract is not being lived up to, then the signers have an option to terminate if the contract is not fulfilled.
A lot of times music contracts have a last-chance clause, along the lines of "if the terms aren't being fulfilled, then the parties have 30 days after written notice of breach of contract to correct the breach" and then after that time period, the rights revert to the artist/licensor.
Our contracts have something like this, and I cannot imagine that Victory, who are a much larger, more business-like label, don't have the same or stronger language.
On the post: Appeals Court Hears Case Over Constitutionality Of Copyright Royalty Board
from the college radio standpoint...
The higher costs for college and community stations to stay current with the DMCA reporting requirements also don't help at all in times of collegiate budget cuts/colleges selling off their stations.
Why is this important? Because while a lot of people are plugged in 24/7, the radio is accessible from everywhere- smart phone, car, home- and community/college stations are open enough where young bands/unknown bands/artists/local activists/politicians can all easily access a broad audience.
So best of luck to this suit. I think the Librarian has been generally receptive to community station concerns, but it's still a weird, obstructive construct that came about when, in 1998, it was obvious to Congress that if one broadcast on-line, one would be raking in mega-money (ha ha ha ha).
On the post: News Agency Seems To Think It Can Copyright The Hells Angels Logo
P.S.
If they aren't claiming (c) on that logo, they oughta edit their site quickly! I hear motorcycles in the distance...
On the post: News Agency Seems To Think It Can Copyright The Hells Angels Logo
Re: Re: Re: Not copyfraud... @ "Paul Renault": Think "MC" on the graphic
One obvious proof of this is that the font is the same as "Hell's Angels." Why would an organization alter their trademark notice to match the font of an outside logo?
On the post: California Politician Discovers That You Can't Ban Specific Type Of Music; Admits 'I Didn't Know What Was Going On'
Re: That's it
I'm serious. The more people who aren't idiots in elected office, the better.
- signed, one of the people who at least THINKS he's not one of the idiots who is in elected office.
On the post: Amtrak Lets You Surf The Web While Traveling, But Don't Try To Read Anything About Gay People
Remember, it's not just Amtrak
Look, Amtrak is a government agency a la the Post Office that's run as a "private" business. It's still public.
So is the county government.
Both are wrong to install these automatic filters since they block a lot of constitutionally-protected press & speech.
Did you notice that the example they gave are NEWS stories? That's preventing access to the press, as well.
On the post: BMI Hurting Artists, Yet Again
BMI from an artist & a venue's standpoint
We basically said all of the things that the restaurant owner (and many of you have said) and ASCAP's response was, "It doesn't matter what songs you actually play, it's based on the square footage. All of this has been legally proven in court so you cannot fight the precedent we've won over the years."
We ended up filing all future letters (some VERY scary legal ones included) in the circular file and stopped returning their phone calls. Since they don't work at night, we never saw them again and we never paid them a cent. About 10 years later, BMI tried a similar campaign and never even got as far as a face-to-face.
As a BMI artist for many years, I personally have never seen a cent from them. Of course, I have nothing in a commercial or on a major label. The most I've sold of a particular record is around 30,000, which is GREAT for punk rock but generally avoided the stores that use Soundscan, commercial radio, and other methods that BMI & the other performing rights organizations use to get their payout information.
As a college radio DJ for almost 20 years, we have an annual BMI week where we write down publishing information for all of the songs we play during that week. BMI allegedly factors that information into their payouts too. Another DJ's friend was at BMI for years and swears that they don't pay attention to their college radio surveys, but that's second-hand so take it with a grain of salt.
So yeah- if you've got a song that's in a commercial situation, you may get paid from BMI. If not, it's only good "just in case" and to lay claim to your own creation (or shared creation, in the case of most rock bands) for whatever the publishing term is.
On the post: What If A Court Gave An Important Ruling, But We Were Not Allowed To Know What It Was?
Re:
On the post: British Historian On Porn And Internet Censorship: North Korea Is Right -- The Internet Is Our Enemy
Re:
Facts can be SO inconvenient!
On the post: Michele Bachmann Comes Out Against PROTECT IP
This proves that...
On the post: US Postal Service Sends Postage Due Bill To Guy Who Put Block Party Invites Into Neighbors' Mailboxes
Mailboxes and Election law
It is illegal to place election material inside of a mailbox (unless it's actually mailed). That's why campaigns that are following the law will instruct canvassing volunteers to bow the paper and put it between the doorjamb & the door knob, or slid it under the side of a mailbox, or do basically anything besides physically opening the mailbox & inserting election material.
2. I think a lot of this ignores the root problem. Yes, some overofficious USPS employee is going overboard, BUT why is the USPS in this position? Because the Congress has mandated that they pay ahead the next 70 years of benefits over the next couple of years. This blew a ginormous hole in their budget.
Adding to that is the Republicans insistence on the USPS paying for itself. That makes sense if its a private business, but the mail is a public service with responsibilities of ensuring communication access to all addresses, no matter what, that private companies are not bound to.
Imagine if public transit had to pay for itse- oh wait, no wonder there's always service cuts and price hikes. Or imagine if FIRE DEPARTMENTS had to pay for themselves? Thankfully, we're not there yet in the US, but it's only a matter of time... unless we as a country smarten up.
On the post: CA Governor Lets Police Search Your Smartphones At Traffic Stops
Re: Re: Serious question
Hmm, should we push to educate more of our residents or should we continue to isolate legal residents whose parents are illegal and young illegals?
It's like the drive to deny drivers licenses to illegals. The result is more unlicensed drivers with no insurance.
On the post: CA Governor Lets Police Search Your Smartphones At Traffic Stops
Cue "California Uber Alles"...
Is he perfect? Does he always do the right thing? Fuck no, but part of that is the ridiculously bollixed up Legislature in California.
But this decision is bullshit. He should've signed it and sucked up to the Police & Prison Guard unions some other way.
On the post: Did ICE 'Pirate' Its Anti-Piracy PSA?
Re: Re:
Even for the lowliest independent film, there are usually a fair amount of agreements for master & sync rights for music.
I can't IMAGINE what a US government agency would produce in terms of a paper trail for use of a piece of film produced and used by a private corporation. It'd be a battle of red tape back and forth!
Who will win? The FOIA knows, bwahahaha!
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