On 16 Feb 2006 at 13:38, John Howell wrote: > At 10:42 AM +0000 2/16/06, Ken Moore wrote: > >An update on the court case. > > > >1) IIRC, one immediate effect of the judgment is that Hyperion > >decided that they could not afford to release the recording, since > >each sale would make a loss at a viable price. > > > >2) Hyperion will probably survive on its large back catalogue. > >There will be a substantial reduction in the number of new releases > >for a year or two. A major contribution to its survival is that many > >of its artists have offered to work for royalties on sales or for > >deferred fees. > > Which is how pop artists have worked for many years, . . .
And this is the system that has caused many such musicians to abandon their record labels and produce and sell their recordings directly to their fans. This was a major issue in the whole Napster controversy, that the record labels had gamed the system to insure that the musicians never really made back their advances, so that they were always indentured servants of the record companies. Switching over to such a system for early music does not seem to me to be a good thing. I don't remember that anybody in the pop music field (except the record companies) was defending it back when it was a big issue. > . . . while their > backup musicians collect one-time union scale and have no right to > royalties, pace Petrillo. And there you have the marketplace at work, > as it should be. Sawkins won in court but won't make enough to pay > his attorneys. Hyperion lost but is already moving to cut its losses > and will write off its investment in the unissued recording as a > business loss. And the marketplace itself has been changed--not > necessarily for the better and not necessarily for the worse, just > changed--as artists adjust to the court case. It's as true in law as > in anything else: it's impossible to do just one thing. All that is true -- the law is not based in common sense. But the result is that editors can now make claims of pseudo- authorship that are unjustified by their actual work. I, for one, think Sawkins's efforts are intellectually indefensible. As an editor, if I ever have the good fortune to have my editions recorded, I will accept my editing fee and demand no royalties because I have no right to them (in the US, the law is still rational on this subject, so far as I can tell, but I have possibilities of publication/recording in Hong Kong, Austria and Italy, so the issue could still come up). I just don't feel I can take credit for the composer's work that my edition is intended to reconstruct. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
