Karaoke Forums

So far, I like what you're saying Mr. Harrington.
1. It's ok to possess a 1/1 format shift, this now becomes "past-practice".
2. Volunteer for an audit(it's 1/1), and you will not be sued.
3. If sued, then submitting to an audit, and being found to be 1/1 compliant, you will no longer be sued.(that's all I care about)
This is the way many of us thought it was(and have no problem with it), but if you are who you are, it's nice to hear it from you..........thank you for your post.......johnny

One big question remains.
Someone using a pirated hard drive is like a drug "user". Why are there so many pirate hard drive "pushers", boldly selling these drives everywhere on the internet, seemingly undaunted?

I assure you that I am who I am. But I am also who I claim to be.

Just to confirm, in simplified terms, yes, that's accurate. The key to #3 is prompt action. If you get sued, request an audit right away (within 10 days of service of the papers). If you don't do it right away, then you run the risk of being turned down.

Harrington it is your presumption of guilt, without what I could in good conscious call "Damning evidence" that bothers me most about you, your practice, and the KIAA.

What gets people into trouble is usually not what they know or don't know.

It's usually those things of which they are absolutely convinced, that just aren't so.

This is not criminal court, where there is a presumption of innocence and proof is needed beyond all reasonable doubt. It is a civil matter.

In civil disputes, with rare exception, it is a question of what is "more likely than not." We make our investigative judgments based upon what is the most likely explanation for what we see. When we see someone advertising the availability of 100,000 tracks, playing from a computer, who has no history of purchases from SC or its distributors, who has a huge collection of SC tracks, who started in the business 6 months ago, and who plays gigs for $50 and free beer, then the most likely explanation is that they aren't compliant. Most of the people we sue fall into three or more of those categories, and those are by far not the only things we look at.

The great thing about this country is that you don't have to like what we're doing. I can certainly live with it if you don't. I am not here to be liked by you. I'm here in order to get accurate information to the industry.

I wouldn't take either of those options because they are simply a trick in my opinion for them to gain control of you by signing away your rights. Notice that neither of his "solutions" allow you to continue operating your business without making them a partner.

You can't deny that your client has permitted KJ's that are running computers permission to shift, with no audit and an immediate "with prejudice" dismissal. To deny this would simply be a boldfaced lie in my opinion.

Yah I'm well familiar with that. I worked for a company where the ex-cto got canned, and blamed me for "giving his source code to the company" for about 4 years.

After about 4 years of blanket motion of denials we were in pre-trial. I was being offered a $1500 "judgement of procedure" Myself, my lawyer were all ready to fight this tooth and nail when the judges assistant came out.

"Robert Cortese huh? I went to SCU with your uncle Dom. Nice family, listen, the judge sent me out here to talk to you about your case"

"I'M READY TO FIGHT!"

"Well, here's the thing Robert, in order to fight, the judge has to hire a court reporter, and if it's jury trial, we have to interrupt the lives of 12 people, not to mention we have to hire a bailiff, all over what could have been settled for $1500, do you really think the judge is going to be happy about that?"

"Where do I make my check sir?"

I know the difference, and again, I question you for your presumption of guilt, not the courts.


Granted, there are those out there like that, but even one of your most vocal cheerleaders, athena, started off as a suspect.

As far as your other cheerleaders, we have one that was a suspected multirigger before discovering Jesus. This irritates me and others to no end. Bad enough we had to compete with these knuckleheads, now you want to keep them in business? No thanks.


Yah as long as you don't sucker punch me in the face (this actually happened to me last week, which between talking to detectives and other stuff has kept me busy from responding)

I agree. It's good we can agree to disagree.

How exactly does volunteering for an audit, being cleared and the suit dropped make you in any way a "partner"?

Talk about drivel.....

Thunder: I'll see if i can find the relevant posts but soundchoice has posted IN THIS FORUM that they cannot GUARANTEE that the rights holders of the LYRICS *ie the sync* part won't come after you. They do not control these rights. Therefore only way to 100% GUARUNTEE this is to get permission directly from them. The most obvious way would be a license like the AVLA .


you yourself have stated that fair use does NOT cover commercial use, so show me the law that says you can format shift without the consent of the IP holders. I won't hold my breath

It would seem Thunder has been banned from KS again.

JDmeister posted notice of it in another thread. No explanation given.

_________________
Never the same show twice!

I don't know either.

_________________
LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

He seems to have taken my thread with him, when he went. Someone else started a new one on the same topic.

Guess he's just a sucker for taking the bait from the baitees!

Ignore this post....

My understanding is that Panorama Top Hits Monthly are now the property of Stellar Records.

Their "Compliance Assistance Program" lists Panorama titles:

http://www.stellarrecords.com/cap/CAP%20Series%203.pdf

_________________
"Just Say NO, To Justin Bieber & His Beatle Haircut"

If you sign an audit agreement or a gem agreement, you are making them partners.

If you subject yourself to a self-inflicted-audit, then you're simply agreeing that they should have control of you and your business.... although others would simply label it in a more tasteful way by saying; "it's proactive."

The audit is nothing more than a shakedown in my opinion.

I have deleted and reposted this from a previous post I made in this thread (before it gets buried beneath all the talk about Thunder being banned from K-Scene)....


This is addressed to James Harrington.....




Could you elaborate on how you or your investigators obtain that kind of information?

The availability of a KJ having 100K (Plus) songs is easy enough to ascertain. But (giving the benefit of the doubt to the KJ), finding out where a person purchased his/her discs ? There are a lot of sites out there that sell legitimate discs, Do they report to SC that they just made a sale of disc number xxxx to KJ Jones? As for me personally, I don't have receipts for most of the discs I bought (and I purchased most of my stuff either from a store located in NY, or a few well known Karaoke websites). I didn't keep my receipts because I was originally purchasing my discs as a hobby. When I got to over 400 discs, that's when I entered the arena and have tried my hand at hosting. Of course, I'm not concerned about this, because I am strictly disc-operated.

How do you know that a KJ has only been in the business for 6 months? How would the place that hired them know that? It's not something that would come up in a normal conversation. Likewise with how much a KJ makes (as you stated in one of your criteria.... $50 and all the Beer they can drink). If I were to go up to a KJ and ask him what he is making per show, chances are, if he doesn't know me from Tom, Dick, or Harry, he's going to say me that it's none of my business. Likewise with asking the Bartender what he's paying the KJ... that's something that's usually kept between the KJ and the Venue.




How do you go about enforcing the destruction of the counterfeit material? Also, is this just SC material that you are referring to, or every single Manufacturer's brand (Music Maestro, All Hits, Priddis, Pioneer, DK, Dangerous, Lost Classic, Back Stage Karaoke, Performance Tracks, Top Hits Monthly (Panorama Music, which is now out of the Karaoke business), JVC, Standing Ovation, Sound Images, etc...) that a KJ may have stored in his/her HD that he/she doesn't have a disc to match it up to?

Unfortunately, no. That would get into investigative methods, and we don't talk about that because (a) it's subject to attorney work-product immunity (similar to the attorney-client privilege) and (b) it would undermine the effectiveness of the methods. The information is obtained through fully legal means.




We only enforce for SC, although we recommend that settling defendants get legal with all manufacturers. Enforcement is through a contractual agreement, with inspection to verify.

And where do all of these out-of-the-business manufacturers come into play in all of this (I named quite a few of them above)?

So, if I am understanding this correctly, you ONLY care about SC's product, and NOTHING else. Once you audit a KJ who has 120K plus songs loaded illegally on a Harddrive, all you oversee is that the SC material in question is deleted (for argument's sake, let's say that's about 40K songs). Now the said "Pirate" agrees to purchase/lease SC's GEM series (consisting of about 6K songs), and he still has 80K plus songs left on his Harddrive. Am I missing something???????????

OK!!! I get it now!!! I can finally see where the playing field has been leveled/evened out for all the legal KJs out there.

To the contrary, we care a great deal about the user deleting unlicensed material, and we lean on settling defendants to delete unlicensed material, but we don't have standing to require that in court.

However, if you have pirate KJs in your area who are interfering with your business by using unlicensed copies of karaoke songs, I can't see anything that would prohibit you from bringing your own suit to stop them from doing that.