From Forbes:
[T]he son and estate of Broadway composer Harold Arlen [have] filed a lawsuit against Apple and other businesses for selling over 6,000 unauthorized recordings of his music. Described as a “massive music piracy operation,” the lawyers claim that “Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Pandora and their distributors have joined with notorious music pirates to sell and stream thousands of pirated recordings.”
According to the lawsuit, the largest digital music stores and streaming services are now flooded with unauthorized copies of Arlen’s songs that are being sold under different record labels for less than the price of the authorized copies of Arlen’s songs. For example, one online retailer is selling a song from the Jamaica cast album under the record label Soundtrack Classics for $0.99 alongside an authorized copy of the song from the RCA Victor record label for $1.29. The cover art of the Soundtracks Classics version has been doctored to remove RCA Victor’s logo.
“It is hard to imagine that a person walking into Tower Records, off the street, with arms full of CD’s and vinyl records and claiming to be the record label for Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald, could succeed in having that store sell their copies directly next to the same albums released by legendary record labels, Capitol, RCA, and Columbia, and at a lower price,” stated Arlen’s attorneys. “Yet, this exact practice occurs every day in the digital music business where there is unlimited digital shelf space … and a complete willingness by the digital music stores and services to seek popular and iconic recordings from any source, legitimate or not, provided they participate in sharing the proceeds,” they argued.
. . . .
Arlen composed [music for] The Wizard of Oz. Its iconic tune “Over the Rainbow” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1939, and was later named the “Song of the Century.”
Link to the rest at Forbes
“… that are being sold under different record labels …”
So they’re going after the wrong targets? Oops …
While Apple, Amazon, Google, ect are the stores selling the fakes/counterfeits, they are not the one marketing them as the real thing.
And before we get the ‘it should be easier to stop this’, please recall that we already have that DCMA thing that the big boys use to take stuff down that isn’t even theirs.
And we’ve all watched the screaming every time Amazon does lock things down a bit and ‘honest’ writers get caught because they were using same/similar methods as the scammers/gamers.
“Its iconic tune “Over the Rainbow” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1939 …”
Yup, that death plus seventy is going to haunt us for a very long time.