Edwyn Collins & Featured Artist Coalition: trouble with copyright

Cabalamat blogs on The Pirate Party blog about the case of Edwyn Collins - who was barred by MySpace from uploading his own music because he didn't own the copyright - but he does.  The story was also covered in the Guardian but origininates from Edwin's wife and manager Grace on the blog on Edwyn's MySpace page..

According to the Guardian the villians of the piece are Warner Music group - who have been contacted by Grace but months later failed to resolve things.. (It's nowhere explained if Edwyn also owns the copyright on his recordings..)  The savvy Grace also comments "Warner's were one of the lead petitioners in the attempt to put those three stoner lads in Sweden in prison recently, remember."

What the Guardian doesn't mention (nor Cabalamat for that matter) is that Grace's original blog post is a response to the Featured Artist Coalition's "Air statement".  This statement of support for Lily Allen also includes this curious statement:

"Our meeting also voted overwhelmingly to support a three-strike sanction on those who persistently download illegal files, sanctions to consist of a warning letter, a stronger warning letter and a final sanction of the restriction of the infringer’s bandwidth to a level which would render file-sharing of media files impractical while leaving basic email and web access functional."


They are trying to play the nice guy by stopping short of an outright ban - but it misses the point....  Leaving aside whether file-sharing for non commercial use should in fact be an offence -
 
If you commit a crime in the street you are not banned from the street, if you rob a bank you are not banned from banks, and if you commit a crime on the internet you should not be banned from the internet. Moreover, a group punishment - affecting anyone in a household - is inherently unjust. 
 
Besides which.... What level of bandwidth stops you downloading a 3Mbyte .mp3 but let's you happily surf around bandwidth hungry websites?

So basically FAC.  Your position sucks.

Grace hits the point...
"The gig's up. You might as well take a position about when you want the sun to come up in the morning. It's over. Now let's get on with working out a wonderful new way for music lovers to enjoy music for free or for a small subscription that makes it legal and easy to hear ANYTHING and allows the artist to reap the rewards of such freedom of access. Viva la revolucion! "


 
Edwyn ROCKS!.. and get's my best wishes...
 



Piratpartiet & The Pirate Party - Working for copyright reform