EMI Sharing Unauthorized Music?
from the whoooops.... dept
The wording of the article is not at all clear, so what’s happening here may not be entirely accurate, but it certainly sounds like EMI has a… bit of a double standard when it comes to the question of sharing “unauthorized” music. The label apparently could not come to an agreement with the band King Crimson concerning the digital rights to their music, and told the band not to worry about the digital rights because such rights were “not important.” When the band disagreed, no agreement was made. However, it appears that even after the older contract ended, EMI had no problem passing on King Crimson tunes whose rights they no longer owned to various music download stores, including Apple’s iTunes. TheRegister now wants to know if EMI will sue itself for unauthorized distribution of music. Of course, it also shows how the recording industry continues to try to play musicians. By this point, everyone realizes it’s important to figure out the digital music issue, and here are the record labels, who get 70% of the proceeds on downloads, telling the artists digital rights don’t matter.