[Fmpro] PRO strategy: need advice

[Rick Blanc]

 A little off-topic perhaps but...

 One common thread here seems to be the problem
 of institutional corruption.  It is not a new
 problem.  The first direct reference to
 this topic that I am familiar with is from
 Augustine's "City of God."  Basically, my
 interpretation of what he wrote was that
 corruptibility is a function of human nature.
 All institutions are susceptible and without
 vigilance most if not all will become
 corrupt over time.

 His book was a defense of Christianity, as
 christianity had been blamed for the fall of the
 Roman Empire.  His solution was a Christian one
 (I'm not evangelising here, just thinking) in
 that he believed every 'citizen' had to live in
 two cities, the "City of Man" and the "City of
 God."

 At any rate it would seem that despite our
 dramatic progress in so many areas over the past
 1600 years the problem of institutional
 corruption persists.

 Someone else said civilization depends on
 obedience to the unenforceable.  What to do?

 In the USA we theoretically have legal remedies
 or at least the right to petition for such
 remedies.  Do our current dilemmas reflect a
 flaw in the system or a failure on our part to
 petition the system properly?  If there is a
 systemic flaw what is it?

 Rick


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Mark Northam 
  To: fmpro at nxport.com 
  Sent: Monday, October 01, 2007 8:35 AM
  Subject: Re: [Fmpro] PRO strategy: need advice


  Hi Zev -

  Great that you're on top of this!

  You probably know this, but in case you or others don't, film performances
  in movie theatres in the US pay zero performing rights from ASCAP and BMI, a
  catastrophic loss to composers by any measure.

  The story behind this has a familiar ring to it, sadly. Movie theatres used
  to pay a "seat tax" up until the 1940s to the PROs. According to the book
  "Pennies from Heaven" by Russell Sanjek, considered an expert on the history
  of US performance royalties, ASCAP decided it wanted to triple the seat tax
  being charged to the movie theatres. The movie theatres, at the time owned
  by the movie production companies, decided they were going to fight the
  tripled tax (who wouldn't?) and took the matter to court, claiming that
  since their common owner had already paid the composer to write the music,
  why should they have to pay the composer (through ASCAP) again to perform
  the music that they already paid to have composed.

  The movie theatres were victorious, and the precedent that ASCAP arrogance
  created has been a financial disaster for composers since the mid 1940s. The
  case was called Alden Rochelle v. ASCAP, and it's something they (ASCAP)
  really, really don't like to talk about (or have discussed publicly). Alden
  Rochelle ranks right up there with the "Girl Scouts incident" on the list of
  things ASCAP wish would just go away.

  But Alden Rochelle has it's own current offspring - the broadcasters
  regularly use it as a "hammer" to beat ASCAP with, threatening to try and
  use it as a legal precedent to become exempt from paying performance
  royalties at all - especially in cases like FOX which and many cable
  networks where they broadcast music that they have already paid for from
  their production arms.

  You figure that after this many decades, perhaps our friends at ASCAP would
  realize that arrogance doesn't pay. But 1,250 signatures to get on the
  ballot, some of arguably the world's most prejudicial weighting formulas
  against instrumental music in the world, and an attitude that seemingly if
  you're not a superstar that you're lucky to get any attention at all from
  them seems to indicate that arrogance is somehow inbred into the songwriters
  that run that organization. Either way, though, composers lose. They lose
  with the weightings, they lose with poor tracking, they lose with movie
  theater losses, and they lose with elections at ASCAP where real democracy
  has given way to good-ole-boy politics done in secret by a ruling group that
  will say and do anything to maintain their grip on power and whatever perks
  their positions may provide, no matter how offensive those policies may
  towards democracy.

  Best

  Mark Northam


  On 10/1/07 8:03 AM, "Lev Zemlinski" <zemlinsk at yahoo.com> wrote:

  > We have a lot of American films in theatres, and
  > though the amount of screens is not so big as in USA,
  > it is a real money. For example, the film which I
  > wrote music recently makes about 200-250 k$ for
  > weekend, or about 2000$ for one screen.



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