James Delahunty
23 Sep 2004 18:09
Universal Music Group boss John Kennedy can’t wait to sue British file-sharers. He revealed this at the In The City music conference in Manchester. John Kennedy is set to replace Jay Berman as head of the IFPI, which is like a worldwide version of the RIAA. He defended lawsuits against file-sharing and certainly did like to throw the word "stealing" around. He also praised the "poisoning" of files on P2P networks. Kennedy also vowed to fight to extend European Copyright past 50 years, using the excuse that he wished to bring it into line with the rest of the world.
Kennedy went on to say that he had very little sympathy for the 12 year old victim of RIAA lawsuits who lived in a New York housing project. He called her a "serious file-sharer". Her family ended up paying thousands of dollars in a settlement to the RIAA. He even has less sympathy for songwriters, who receive a very small fraction of the royalties that recordings owners receive saying that it was fair as hits were down to investment in marketing. He said he would be more sympathetic to songwriters the day that labels had 50 per cent margins.
He also went ahead to claim that record labels were still needed stating that no unsigned bands had been broken by the Internet. This leads to only one conclusion, that he's not very familiar with the technology used in file-sharing on the Internet. As file-sharing progresses it seems likely that sites will spring up to aid in the distribution over P2P of music from unsigned artists, that is until of course the IFPI and RIAA try to convince Governments that these services are evil.
Source:
The Register