rickgood wrote:
I think the most relevant issue is that the legal authorities don't care about karaoke piracy. Try going down to your local police station and reporting that the host up the street is using pirated karaoke tracks, I'll probably be able to hear their burst of laughter from where i live. Also, the remaining active producers of karaoke content don't care enough to pursue it either. The only folks who care are the hosts that feel it creates an unlevel playing field for them and the two producers who have been forced out of the production business and into the lawsuit business.
I have said this more than once, until you make the penalty unbearable, piracy will continue. Take pirate's equipment, cars, houses, etc.and the word will get out pretty quickly. The strategy of making them buy your product when you catch them is not really a deterent, as we all can see. I moved from Raleigh, NC to Myrtle Beach, SC last fall. There are probably 3 times as many karaoke shows here because it's a popular entertainment option in a resort area. You'd be stunned at the number of KJs who advertise that they have more than 200,000 songs. Not my problem because they are not my direct competition but they continue to flourish here.
What does that say rick about the importance of this question of piracy? Society minimizes it, but not only society, the victims themselves. Only two producers have tried the legal process approach and they have not sought criminal charges or penalties. They have instead elected to go the civil suit route. You also have to ask yourself what are the actual damages to the producer, the answer the fair retail value of the product. That is the extent of their damages per defendant. That is why you get the cookie cutter $5,000.00 settlements in California, and the fair retail award in Panama City. That is why probably other still viable producers have not bothered, it is not worth their time. What the two suing producers are hoping is that they will cause enough of a stir for hosts to voluntarily line up to license or subscribe to their respective products, this hasn't happened yet.
To get the type of penalties you want imposed you would have to elevate the lowly KJ pirate host to the level of the Mob or Organized crime. You might be able to do that with the HD producers but I think you would have a difficult time with small pirate KJ operations. I don't know if you could get civil RICO applied to such little operations. The only time recently I have heard of civil RICO being invoked with karaoke is when CAVS amended it's original complaint against SC. Of course that was all settled by the out of court settlement reached where SC had to pay off CAVS.
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