Bloody Hell!

Copyright collectives!

Ya' need 'em in this the 'biz of music. But their time in the sun has been too long. Most of them have turned more than a bit rum, if you get my drift, which you would if you snift. An unrefrigerated carcass is a devil-made thing to lure our guild's buzzards and vultures to hell.

Big Reform is the order of the day. And another day, when my man Bix is around to top my glass, I'll expound.

(Damme, I gave Bix the week to bask at Clacton-on-Sea -- a stretch of Essex sand set aside for calloused classes -- forgetting I gave him a week last March for a legover at the Union of British Gentlemen's Gentlemen do in Blackpool. Two weeks holiday in one year! I shall remember come Boxing Day. His old mum down Ealing way shall have to be content with a phone call this year.)

Where was I?

Yes, copyright collectives. I refer to MCPS / PRS / BMI / ASCAP/ SESAC / PPL / VPL / JLO (and so on through the alphabet ad infinitum) - the lot that levies royalties (e.g. taxes on the little people) o/b/o those of us touched by the creative muse.

Admittedly, I'm provincial. Oh, staunchly pro-Empire, don't get me wrong. But a Little Englander when it comes to fretting about fuss and feathers flying beyond my own bailiwick, Hamsammich Castle and environs. Hence, doings in lesser colonies, like Canada, sometime elude.

Parenthetically, I am awake to copyright matters in America. One must be awake to what happens there, for the self-styled USA is our noisiest colony.

(As my peers of long standing know and applaud, I DO NOT accept the legality of rebellion against the Crown, and therefore view America's claim to independence as a childish fantasy we must tolerate 'til they outgrow it.)

Where am I? Ah.

So, Bix-lessly I browse my reading matter today, turning pages myself, and stumble across dear Michael Geist's blog. (He's that bright young Canadian solicitor who dabbles in thinking, unlike most of his breed.)

In his most excellent post (in which I was horrified to learn the Canadian Copyright Board thinks to defy a contrary ruling from the Court of Appeal and levy a C$75 tax on the sale of every I-Pod to benefit so few to the detriment of so many), he says the following:

The copyright collective system was designed to pave the way for paying creators and facilitating access to copyrighted works. With 34 Canadian copyright collectives, a prohibitively expensive litigation process that excludes many interested parties, price-distorting fees such as the private copying levy, questions about the fairness of royalty distribution, and a Copyright Board that seemingly places its views above the courts, changes to the system appear to be long overdue

Source: Michael Geist - Ipod Levy May Yet Face The Music

Thirty-four copyright collectives? !!! !!! ??? !!!

Are they daft? Are there that many Creative Canadians?

What is this vast but barely populated hodge-podge of amusingly named provinces doing with 34 bloody copyright collectives?

Where is Mrs. Thatcher when we need her?

I'd go on, dear reader, but I'm drained. You know how tiresome it is when the servants are below (or at Clacton!) having their crust, those hallowed times when manners and custom dictate we daren't disturb them.

So, 'til next I stir, toodles.

Lord Lunch

Hamsammich Castle

Worcestershiresauce, England

How Revolting!

CRB's Asinine Webcaster Rate Endangers Entire Music Industry

Are Copyright Royalty Judges educated men or mere motley-minded, brainless barnacles scraped from the rotting bottom of a Cornish fisherman?

The question begs thoughtful ponder in wake of the three stooges, er, judges’ diktat crucifying Internet radio on a cross of gold.

The Copyright Royalty Board’s shameful edict, should it stand, portends universal mammocking of copyright statutes entire. Why, forsooth, should any moiety of copyright law command respect when miscreated regulatory rulings make a mockery of the copyright concept itself?

Indeed, when a confiscatory regulation crafted by contemptible coo-coos in cahoots with maggot-infested magpies has the force of statutory law, the entire statute deserves public disdain. Without qualm or compunction, the nation will scorn, ignore, and disregard all provisions of the Copyright Act.

This is War!

My Lords, Ladies, and all who toil in the music industry’s withering vineyards, mistake me not: the Copyright Royalty Board’s “Judges” have not merely decreed an absurdly burdensome royalty requirement on webcasters; they have literally declared war on us all.

The death knell of a relatively small but promising sector of our industry foretells a coming plague picking us off house by house.

But take heart. The self-satisfied smirks adorning RIAA Ayatollahs and brass asses reigning over the less than one handful of major labels shall be short-lived. Highborn priests think they themselves to be, but brains have been bred out of them all.

Disciples of Ned Ludd

Witness: the RIAA’s cruel crusade against young babes and old maids alienates millions while achieving naught. Unauthorized copyright downloading grows by leaps and bounds. Never mind. The RIAA’s misbegotten Luddist policy continues as we watch their ludicrous attempt to herd 1,000s of jumping frogs.

And their attack-attack tack, I foreglimpse, shall do for them what a hornet’s nest whacked by a stout cricket bat does for the whacker.

Should the self-anointed aristocracy succeed (they won’t) in suppressing the smelly class (the yeomen, the scullions, chimneysweeps, stable boys, and chamber pot makers - anyone with an independent streak, entrepreneurial spirit, and creative energy), the rarified air reserved for his nibs's executive suites shall grow thin, stale, then putrid with the smell of rotting carcasses – their own.

1776 and All That

The judicial Pharisees would be well advised to examine the informative leaves of history for a sense of what they may have wrought. Particularly should they linger in those chapters retailing the rebellious rumblings of His Majesty’s Yankee subjects 230 years ago.

And as they ruminate on the subject of how past is prologue, yon judges should heed the thunderous garboil emanating from wounded webcasters, for they shan’t be long alone.

Nay, I venture their plaints shall become a clarion call, summoning the masses to rally to their cause. And rally the masses shall, for ancestral bravery and American instinct for justice comprise the DNA of all citizens whose overburdened backs are bent to breaking under the weight of taxes imposed willy-nilly by unelected mollycoddles.

Men of stout hearts, feathered headdresses, and rouge-daubed faces shall figuratively board a symbolic trader in Boston Harbor. Into the sea shall they cast offending chests of tea rather than submit to insultuous taxes clapped thereupon by fatuous placemen of fartuous character.

Viva La Cucaracha

I call upon every member of every sector of our industry to show steadfast solidarity with webcasters large and small.

Our planet has suffered calamities wiping out entire species, but one creature has always managed to survive. That indestructible creature is of course the lowly and despised cockroach. And lowly and despised is how the RIAA and their CRB lackeys view us, thee and me.

All right then!

So be it. Let us henceforth assume the mantle of those ancient beings – The Cockroaches.

Let us affix an emblem of the same wherever appropriate on our daily dress, as a badge of inspirational honor, a sign of invincibility.

Lettuce march arm in arm, armed to the teeth with the might of right, carrying high the unfurled and proudly flapping flag of that indestructible creature, the cockroach.

Chunk us our gauntlets in the cretinous faces of those who deign to exterminate us.

Lock arms brothers and sisters! Surge forward! Over the River Rubicon of No Return go we. United in sheer numbers, the bastards we shall overwhelm.

And, like our namesake, we too shall prevail.

Lord Lunch
Hamsammich Castle
Worcestershiresauce, England