- The movie cartels and studios are dirty thieves and pirates who regularly steal money from copyright owners, as well as the actual copyrighted works themselves. And that’s not just my personal opinion. It’s A PROVEN, INDISPUTABLE FACT.
This is hardly headline-making news for web sites such as p2pnet and others like it which strive to – and succeed in – reporting the real story, and debunking cartel claims of profit loss. But when the cartel-controlled lamestream news organisations report it (albeit not with the same robustness and integrity as the real news organisations), it’s noteworthy.
According to the BBC, Variety, and others, Time Warner's New Line cheated the rights owner of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy out of millions of dollars in royalties. But how could that be? The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is an honest, law-abiding organisation which protects and defends its own and would never steal from the legal owner of a copyrighted work. Right? WRONG!
Since the mid-Seventies, 84-year-old producer Saul Zaentz has owned the rights to the LOTR trilogy. He optioned them to Miramax (for a percentage of ticket sales, minus “certain deductions”) and Miramax, in turn, cut the same deal with New Line.
The studio paid Zaentz based on net receipts, but he claimed New Line’s calculations should have reflected gross receipts. And the Los Angeles Superior Court agreed, awarding Zaentz at least $20 million, making his total income from the three films – on which he did absolutely no work – a mind-boggling $168 million!
But the story of stolen LOTR royalties doesn’t end here.
Peter Jackson, the director of the trilogy which earned world-wide box office receipts of $2.9 billion, has his own lawsuit pending against New Line. He alleges the studio owes him from box office receipts from the first film, as well as from DVD sales, computer games and other merchandise and toys.
And although it hasn’t been reported, one can reasonably assume that Jackson’s argument is the same as Zaentz’s – cooked books.
We already knew the trilogy earned billions of dollars. And now we know exactly where the money went – into the already-bulging coffers of the cartels. It’s a proven fact.
I definitely don’t feel sorry for the guilty criminals at New Line, but I nor do I feel sorry for Zaentz, who surely doesn’t need the money, having already earned an insane amount from producing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”, “Amadeus” and “The English Patient”, besides the LOTR trilogy and others.
But at least he’s lived long enough to collect what’s owed him and he can spend the rest of his miserly days counting it.
And I certainly don’t sympathise with Jackson who, besides directing these three mediocre “blockbusters”, now commands upwards of $20 million per directing stint – not including royalties.
In another court case – unrelated to the New Line/LOTR scam, but nonetheless relevant – Sony BMG Music Entertainment has been found guilty of copyright infringement, violating intellectual property law.
Reuters reports that Sony BMG stole “sounds” from Namco America’s Pac-Man arcade game, and used them in rapper Lil' Flip’s song “Game Over”. Without first obtaining permission from Namco – the legal owner of the sounds!
Oh…my…God! How could Sony BMG do that? It’s unbelievable that such a respected company would ever think of stealing a copyrighted work in order to make money for itself. Right? WRONG!
This is most probably just the tip of the iceberg, and hopefully more lawsuits like this one will be filed.
Now, I said Sony BMG was “found guilty," but that’s not technically correct. Actually, Namco had filed the lawsuit in federal court for the Southern District of New York. But today it was announced that Sony BMG and Namco America had settled out of court, details unknown at this time.
So, is Sony BMG “guilty”? Legally, no. But as the cartels and lamestream media constantly "report," thousands of innocent people have been “successfully sued” and “found guilty of illegal filesharing,” although not a single case has ever been to court. Nor has anyone ever been “found guilty” of anything.
So I’ll just take a page out of the cartels’ book and state unequivocally that Sony BMG was successfully sued and has been found guilty of copyright infringement, violating intellectual copyright laws.
All this is indisputable proof that the MPAA is filled with dirty thieves, liars and pirates. Hopefully more lawsuits like these will be filed, if only to publicize the hypocritical, dishonest criminals of the MPAA who use crooked accounting calculations to steal from the rich in order to make themselves richer, and who also claim to be so protective of copyright laws, going after innocent people to collect money not owed to them and subsequently forcing many people into debt they’ll never get out of.
Hopefully, more lawsuits like these will bring the cartels to their knees, crawling into the 21st century with new business models, begging consumers to come back to them, and finally stop terrorizing everyone under the sun with their holier-than-thou attitudes!
