Breaking: Now the record industry sues a starving country

Breaking: Now the record industry sues a starving country

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norman lebrecht

January 13, 2012

All four major labels have put their name to a lawsuit that aims to force a country to introduce anti-piracy laws and pay damages for past abuses.

EMI, Sony, Warner and Universal are named in the suit.

The country they are pursuing is the Republic of Ireland, where the economy has collapsed in the Euro bust and young people – the ones who use music most – are fleeing the country in numbers unseen since the potato famine.

The biz may be right to stop people stealing its apples, but its timing is skewed and the victim it has picked can hardly pick itself off the ropes. hat do they want of the poor Irish?

Think again, suits.

 

Comments

  • Joep Bronkhorst says:

    I get a 404 on that link

  • steven says:

    i guess spain was too big a fish for them. One may expect piracy in Ireland to increase now, if only for the record company’s timing.

  • Emil Archambault says:

    And I thought countries had the right to decide what laws they were to enact…

    • Tony says:

      Nice idea that countries should have the right to decide what laws they want to enact, but not these days – especially when the US sees all its allies as ‘client states’. I have no doubt that this push against Ireland is coming from US lawyers.

      For example the USA Administration is currently pushing the UK very hard to extradite a UK citizen who as a student in the UK had a UK website including displaying blue underlined weblinks to 3rd Party video and music download sites which included some quite possibly ‘dodgy’ ones in terms of respecting copyright. This would not be an offence in the UK, but is (probably or possibly) in the USA. Yet it looks as though our UK Government will simply wash its hands and hand over this poor soul for trial in the USA after having committed no offence in the UK under British sovereign law.

      US lawyers have long arms to go after people and organisations outside their US jurisdiction and I believe that British and Irish legal systems should have more respect for their own citizens and their own independence. This is all part of the same rendition concept that US lawyers believe that they have power in any and every territory to do whatever they feel like.

    • UMPG and its subsiduary EMI think they own anything and everything. What they really own is youth marketing media, all of which causes depression and helps to sell…. you guessed it, alcohol and drugs.

      • Anon says:

        Eh? EMI is not yet a “subsiduary” [sic] of UMPG (I assume you mean Universal), and why on earth would they be trying to sell alcohol and drugs? That would be a crazy business model! The record business is daft enough already without trying to sell products it doesn’t produce or make any money from.

  • Barry Johnstone. says:

    Don’t fire until you see the greens of their eyes!

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