ROYALTIES? You can NOT be SIRIUS!

The old joke: "Where there's a will, there's a relative."

And where there's music playing...there's an artist being screwed. Not only are books cooked, not only are there so many creative ways of NOT reporting radio use, podcast use, juke box use etc. etc., there are laws actively denying the obvious, which is that you should be paid for your work.

I'm including YOU. If YOU are a retired teacher or garbage collector or cop, you expect a pension. If you've simply managed to live into old age, you expect the government to offer social security.

And yet, when somebody else is making money off what you did, like a radio station making money from ads or subscribers for a song people still want to hear, YOU aren't entitled to a royalty?

Don't tell me woman is the nigger of the world. It's the copyright owner.

Frankly, I didn't know about the weasel activity just reported. But I'm not surprised.

In America, there are some complicated copyright laws, especially about the length of time a work is protected. It seems to depend on the media. A book author is usually protected for life. The copyright doesn't expire until the author does. And I think it might not expire for 20 or 30 years after that...so the heirs can have some bucks, too. A film? This is protected for something like 75 years. Which is why the movie studios glance at the great works about to expire (like those 1930's Universal horror movies and Marx Brothers films) and quickly issue DVD sets for one last blast...if they can't find some "trick" to keep control. Like pointing out that the soundtrack to the film is protected by a longer music copyright...so someone wanting to copy the film can't use the soundtrack!

When Ronald Reagan ran the Screen Actors Guild, the prick cheerfully made a sweetheart deal that denied royalties for movies played on TV. Meaning, for example, that when Columbia issued Three Stooges shorts to TV, the actors were not paid a penny. Then we have "new media," like streaming video and DVDs, which were unknown when contracts were signed. Now? Good question...and you know the answer. The "suits" have found ways of making sure that performers in 60's sitcoms don't get a penny on DVD sales.

As for music, well, many fingers are in the pie. A recording is protected by copyright in various ways, and various "suits" are in control. The SALE of a record is controlled by the MPAA. Copyright still exists on some 78's, the way it does on old 30's movies. (In the UK, copyright doesn't last that long...hence the bizarre situation of a 1959 Flanders & Swann album potentially going into public domain any minute in the UK, but still being protected in America. Meaning, someone in the UK can grab a Parlophone recording and dupe it and sell it legally...while someone in the USA can't do the same for that very same recording on the Capitol label!)

Radio play and juke box usage is controlled by ASCAP or BMI. There's a huge mess here...between payment for singing on the record (performance rights) and for writing the song itself (publishing). And if that's not fucked up enough,INTERNET streaming and INTERNET radio stations such as Sirius are controlled by yet a different bunch, a group called SOUNDEXCHANGE. How the fuck the greedhead jokers at BMI and ASCAP let some upstarts at SOUNDEXCHANGE horn in, I have no idea...it's probably a mystery cloaked in bribes.

All I can tell you for certain is that NONE of these organizations are looking after the artists. They seem to be making enough money that they rarely file DMCA's against pirates...and seem to tell the artists, "Hey, if you don't like the size of your royalty check, YOU go get a lawyer and take action...we're BUSY." Doing what? Cooking books? Maybe filing one high-profile lawsuit against Sirius while a zillion podcast assholes do as they please? Oh well, that's life...and you hope you can afford to keep living.

And here we have the weird news that somehow individual states in America are involved in copyright, and arbitrarily, artists from the 60's aren't covered the way artists from the 70's are. One big fucking mess...quite disgusting that artists who amuse us and deserve to profit...are being kicked, tricked, laughed at, spat on, cheated boldly, cheated with accountant tricks, pushed filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed and starved.