[Dixielandjazz] Copyrights

[TCASHWIGG at aol.com]

Hi Bruce:

Because the nature of ASCAP and BMI is one of Mafia style legal extortion.  
Notice almost all the heavy weight enforcers are of Italian decent.  And I do 
not mean to be racist here, just a matter of fact.  Sort of like the same thing 
applies when you run into Teamster Union officials.  A good place to work if 
your name happens to be Guido or ends in a vowel.


To understand the organizations and how they really operate we must go back 
in history to their founding and examine the reasons and methods of their 
formation carefully.  Do a bit of research into who founded ASCAP and BMI and who 
the major players are that reap the most royalties, it is very very 
interesting.

Those were some tough times in the beginning, but these founding folks were 
less than sympathetic for the songwriters and laborers, they were touting an 
idea to protect them, but from whom.  Most of them actually had no real enemies 
trying to rip them off, but the unions and ASCAP and other organizations 
discovered a legal way to collect money to provide themselves with salaries and 
benefits that often the folks they supposedly represented never had or ever would 
have, with a very minor exception of the few needed to set up the 
organization.  They also set about buying or stealing the copyrights on every song they 
could get their hands on from the uneducated naive songwriters looking for a 
break with the promise of them making big money in royalties.

Over the course of the years the Collection Organizations have continued to 
rewrite the laws to suit themselves and allow them to continue to collect 
monies forever, simply by renewing the copyrights which they own over and over 
again.

They wear smiling friendly faces until you challenge them or refuse to be 
extorted then it gets really ugly and they use their bevy of high powered high 
paid attorneys to go into courts and bamboozle the judges with over 750 pages of 
gobbledygook revisions that they themselves really don't understand.  The 
judge is not about to spend any time reading that stuff for a white collar crime 
so he just sides with the big guys who convince him quickly with the revised 
edition that they wrote to protect themselves. 

They also claim that 86% of the money they collect is dispersed to the 
songwriters, but NOBODY has ever audited them to check it out either, and you can 
bet that they are doing just as they please with the disbursements of those 
Billions of dollars.

Most songwriters who get a check in any amount from them swear by them and 
believe they are being protected because they just consider it found money for 
nothing and their ego causes them to run around telling folks they are getting 
royalty checks.

I own some Oil stocks in Texas too, but I am lucky to get $10.00 a year 
royalties off of them, because the only time they pump any oil out of the wells is 
to protect the tax shelter and sell enough to pay themselves for running the 
operation.  They are hoping that all of us small royalty holders will just die 
off or give up and go away so they can eventually uncap the wells and pour 
freely taking all the money.   

The same principal is in effect with ASCAP & BMI only worse.

The Teamsters charge membership dues and initiation fees of all members and 
after years of collecting from them hope they will get disgusted with the union 
and just go away without auditing them and finding out where all their money 
really went as well.

Cheers,

Tom Wiggins