World HQ.
One interesting, and dismaying, e-letter in yesterday's post has been followed up with new info in this morning's e-tray: a Russian internet site selling "licensed" downloads of KC. We are only one of many "licensees" whose music the site makes available. This is extracted from online news --
A Russian outfit -- is selling digitized music by the megabyte. $5 gets you 500MB of music in the format of your choice (MP3, MPEG4-AAC, OGG, etc.) delivered to your desktop at an impressively fast rate. At such prices, you'd think allofmp3.com's artist catalog would be limited to obscure Russian accordion acts. Not so. The site offers music from a vast array of artists, some from bands who'd no doubt be horrified to find their work featured on it. How is this possible?
allofmp3.com says it pays license fees for the music it sells. And if that's true, the outfit is likely legitimate. Which would be pretty funny, given all that the recording industry has done in the past year to enforce its copyrights. "We can't see any legal or moral objection to using the site," Charles Wright writes in the Sydney Morning Herald. "We're using the material for private use, there is no restriction in this country on the parallel importing of recorded music and none of the artists seem to have been deprived of their rights. While we suspect the recorded music industry would like to earn more from their music, we're in no position to judge the arrangements they might have made with Russia."
Well, as regards King Crimson, I am in a position to judge the arrangements they might have made in Russian: there is no arrangement. Legal or moral objection? This is theft.
There is a significant & qualitative distinction between fan file-swapping & piracy: the difference is in aim. The site above undermines itself by being based on a lie: this material is licensed. From this follows a remorseless & inevitable series of repercussions, many of which are not immediately obvious.
12.01 On the same subject, just into the e-tray from Sean Fitzpatrick --
This thing is spreading like a virus.. I first heard of it a few weeks back, it appeared in a couple of mainstream newspapers at the start of the week in the US & Australia & spread to Internet music industry sites..
The 'concept' seems, in part, based on a charmingly Russian take on the World..
i.e. "poor us - we lived as communists for years & didn't understand the concept of copyright.. you told us we were unenlightened. now we're embracing parts of western capitalism... ('very much we like your free market system') & we're still wrong.. in the meantime - here's the whole beatles catalogue for a dollar & my friend Ivan can get you a dvd of spiderman 2 before it's released in your western cinemas... next week we come to london to buy a house in maida vale.." --
I doubt there's much can be done about this - but probably worth lodging a complaint with BMG publishers & the BPI/IFPI as a starting point..
The Vicar is entirely correct when he says that the only real way to stop this is for the credit card companies to refuse to process the cash - but I'd imagine their attitude is somewhat like E-bay - "hey we're just honest brokers - it's nothing to do with us.."
Perhaps if the IFPI & music publishers ganged up on the credit card companies & threatened a class action to retrieve the amount of income lost via such blatant copyright abuse it might help - but even this seems unlikely...
cheers, Sean.
20.18 DGM SoundWorld I.
The Late Shift. The 21st. Century Guide To King Crimson is this evening's work.
21.02 Volume Four: Live 1973-74 is werning persuasively forward.
22.07 The over-view is in place. Now we are loading in an improv to saffron the predicacion.
23.23 David is going home. KC 1973-74 is in good shape, maybe in better shape than it has ever been.
David: I can hear it now in ways I couldn't hear ten years ago.
RF: The sound remains the same but the music has matured.
"We begin by doing nothing.
Then, we move to doing something."
