Read the article again. The artist had a contract for one performance of a song/video at a film festival. One only. Clearly spelt out in the contract. With an anti-piracy group.

Who then turned around and broke the contract. The irony is delicious, even you have to admit that.

Requested restitution for a deliberate violation of a legal contract? Royalites and accounting. He then gets leaned on to back off.

The conversation gets out verbatim because it was reported. Leaner runs and hides after behaving less like someone interested in stopping piracy than a typical gatekeeper music company/recording company/movie company. “Yeah, we broke a contract, so shut up already and here’s a few (worthless) euros to keep you quiet. Not that we haven’t been doing this for years, you know. Now be a good boy and go away.”

Nothing pro or anti piracy about it. Not a hint of it.

Still, if all you’re left with is your ad homineum argument of “respect for the law” so let me ask, once again, how do you respect a law that allows this sort of activity and has for decades?

And please, no “what about the artists” arguments. We’ve just seen what use the recording industry and music publishers think of “the artists” out of their own mouths.

And how do you square this with your claimed dislike of the current copyright regime and the behaviour it allows gatekeepers to indulge in like this, not to mention, their seeming notion that they have a divine right to mega profits each quarter.

It’s a question you seem unable to answer. I can’t see one as it would require tying yourself into logical and moral gordian knots and then somehow getting out to type your response.

That said, there is no copyright issue here one way or another.

There is, however, the far more important question of contract law and the little detail that BRIEN clearly violated better than a thousand years of English and Dutch contract, civil and common law. Something they don’t deny when Gerrits called the composer.

Instead Gerrits attempts to pressure the composer to give up one third of what he’s owed, under contract, for them to make it right. At best it’s a dodgy negotiation tactic at worst illegal, totally lacking in the principle of “good faith” in contract matters and utter hypocrisy of the highest order.

He wasn’t, technically, robbed of anything as contract law isn’t criminal law unless it gets elevated to that status by a judge or prosecutor it’s civil and common law. That alone is enough for restitution which is demanded under contract law. Under civil (written) and common (unwritten, precedent) law both. And given that they are an anti-piracy group passing themselves off as working in the interests of artists the restitution ought to be substantial just in case a similar organization tries something similar in the future. You see, contract law does not just concern itself with real or potiential loss of income, though it may, what it would concern itself with in this case is the behaviour of BRIEN and the penalty that needs to be extracted based on the behaviour and clear and deliberate breaking of an in force contract.

Yes, he still owns the song, yes he still can make money from the song and likely will even if that does mean a change in lyrical content (and I bet it will!) so in that sense he’s lost nothing and been robbed (theft a criminal offense) of nothing.

BREIN, on the other hand, particularly after the conversation repeated here could be found civilly guilty of breaking the contract deliberately and with malice of forethought (a phrase with particular meaning in contract law) which would increase the restitution the artist would receive as the wronged party in this case. That may, as I said, or may not include loss of income in the award. On balance of probability, how civil actions are judged, I’d say there’s a very good chance of that.

So, to clarify, we’re not talking copyright law here, we’re talking contract law here, a far more important section of civil and common law that copyright ever has or will be as trade and commerce are dependent on signatories to contract to act in good faith towards on another and notify one another where possible of planned or accidental variances to the contract.

Piracy doesn’t enter into it.