The Royalty Scam, its bigger than even the experts think...

The Royalty Scam - New York Times:

A few weeks later, Mr. Birch came to see me at my home. He was hoping to expand his business by hosting music and wanted my advice on how to construct an artist-centered environment where musicians could post original songs without fear of losing control over their work. Following our talks, Mr. Birch told the press that he wanted Bebo to be a site that worked for artists and held their interests first and foremost.

In our discussions, we largely ignored the elephant in the room: the issue of whether he ought to consider paying some kind of royalties to the artists. After all, wasn’t he using their music to draw members — and advertising — to his business? Social-networking sites like Bebo argue that they have no money to distribute — their value is their membership. Well, last week Michael Birch realized the value of his membership. I’m sure he’ll be rewarding those technicians and accountants who helped him achieve this success. Perhaps he should also consider the contribution of his artists.

The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.

What’s at stake here is more than just the morality of the market. The huge social networking sites that seek to use music as free content are as much to blame for the malaise currently affecting the industry as the music lover who downloads songs for free. Both the corporations and the kids, it seems, want the use of our music without having to pay for it.

The claim that sites such as MySpace and Bebo are doing us a favor by promoting our work is disingenuous. Radio stations also promote our work, but they pay us a royalty that recognizes our contribution to their business. Why should that not apply to the Internet, too?

That's all good and well. I just want

1. the royalty rate to be reasonable to the size of the audience that actually allows the possibility that an ad-free site or a single user posting a single excerpt (which should already still be subject to fair use) can afford it, rather than locking the market out to just those super companies that treat their online business as a loss-leader full of advertising for their non-internet products.
2. some actual evidence that the artists whose work is being used are actually the ones getting the money.  there is no evidence anybody has shown that any record label is actually itemizing the songs out there, and yes, its an impossible job considering for many users at sites like myspace you don't even know what songs are on their playlist unless you are their "friend".  But the current industry reaction seems to be to either follow historical tradition (give the money away based on radio air play, with 'net popular artists whose material is not on the air getting shafted) or simply to keep the money for themselves, acting like it'll trickle to the artist eventually by the label's financial stability.  RIGHT...

In online distribution, whether through myspace, iTunes, or torrent sites, the label is and remains a hindrance to musicians getting paid for their music.  The most the labels can do is say "well, when you go broke and your album doesn't sell and technically by contract you owe us a million dollars for the advance we gave you...we won't sue your ass for it."

Trouble being, of course, that's already their attitude, so what's new?

Crap - George Will and I agree on something...

George F. Will - Bargain Basement Judiciary - washingtonpost.com:

The problem, Roberts believes, is that we are not paying enough to acquire judicial competence commensurate with the importance of courts in our system.

Last year the House Judiciary Committee voted 28 to 5 for a significant but only partial restoration of what has been lost: The bill would have increased judicial pay to what it would be if judges had received the same cost-of-living increases that other federal employees have received since 1989. The Senate Judiciary Committee was considering similar legislation when last year's session ended.

The denial of annual increases, Roberts wrote, "has left federal trial judges -- the backbone of our system of justice -- earning about the same as (and in some cases less than) first-year lawyers at firms in major cities, where many of the judges are located." The cost of rectifying this would be less than .004 percent of the federal budget. The cost of not doing so will be a decrease in the quality of an increasingly important judiciary -- and a change in its perspective.

[...]

Conservatives regret this development but must come to terms with its imperatives, one of which is:

The enlargement of the judiciary's role by the regulatory state requires compensation of the judiciary commensurate with its ever-expanding importance. That importance, although regrettable, is a fact, and so is this: You get the quality -- and the perspective -- you pay for.

Well, I agreed with it on the surface, but on another post (which gave a little background on Will's overall view of the Judiciary) led me to write the following:

Oh, I agree with you that Will's constant complaints about the power of the judiciary are unfounded, and he's among the worst of quote-miners and cherry-pickers when it comes to the Federalist Papers excerpts on the subject.

But the overall view that federal judges should be paid (and get raises) on scales that adjust with inflation, as does every other aspect of government payroll (except Congress that has to explicitly vote their own raise every time - who were the ad wizards who came up with THAT one? :) ), I can accept as a valid point.

Then again, if one associates the stereotype of financial greed of the Conservative/Republican side of things, then by raising the salaries of judges, maybe he's implying that one would get more conservative lawyers willing to be judges. He's making it look like it's a case of "you get what you pay for" as a form of quality control, but really he may be saying that "right now, the government can't afford the people I think would become the judges we need to set this country straight."