Karaoke Forums

I agree. However PEP & SC are not the bad guys. Neither is Mr. Harrington. The bad guys are the pirates that took their business from them. Like it or not, this is the result. You can thank your not so honest fellow KJ's.

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Electro-Voice Evolve 50... Taking Sound To The Next Level.

Well, I'm not sure that I would completely agree with you on this one and here's why:
The "pirates" didn't take anything from Phoenix entertainment partners. Sleptone entertainment sold their karaoke tracks – the entire catalog – willingly for large pile of dollars to Stingray Digital. They were paid what they felt was a fair price for the entire catalog and one that they agreed to.

If they were still in business, and suing pirates who stole their tracks from them, then I would agree with you. But unfortunately, they are not. They cashed out their business once, they are not the same company and they simply want to keep cashing in by using the courts.

but they also cannot have it both ways:
#1. They cannot claim that they are the "same company" under a different name – they are not.
#2. It doesn't matter what their history was with the "old company," because that's all water under the bridge – it's dead and gone.

Also, because the court system appears to finally be catching up with them, I would expect to see a fairly substantial uptick in the number of lawsuits that are filed – especially in the ninth district – until that matter is settled completely. Suffice it to say that there may be a rash of delays on the final determination.

As per usual, you omit the facts that are inconvenient to your argument.

A significant portion of the deal with Stingray was the license-back of the tracks for continued production for the professional market. Stingray had no interest in servicing that market. It still doesn't. Because of piracy undertaken by the people you're supporting with this argument, Slep-Tone was deprived of a huge part of the benefit of its bargain with Stingray.

It should be mentioned, by the way, that the Stingray deal did not include anything produced after April 2007, so what about piracy of the tracks that are still owned? What excuse will you offer for that piracy?



Phoenix does not claim to be "the same company" as Slep-Tone. Rather, Phoenix purchased Slep-Tone's assets, including the trademarks, the copyrights, the business goodwill, and so forth, and it has just as much legal and moral entitlement to do what Slep-Tone was doing and could have continued to do--just like any other business in the world that buys the assets of another company. The fact that you think that somehow diminishes Phoenix's rights...well, it's just one more part of the pirate's justification for wrongful conduct.

In one sense, it's good that you're now coming clean about standing on the side of piracy. The pretense otherwise was tiresome.

And these were all deals that Slep-tone did willingly. No one held the Slep's hostage or forced them to do anything and since 2007, Slep-tone produced what? Less than 10 discs? (less than 150 tracks). So the whole "license back" deal is inconsequential. In a sense, Slep-Tone cashed their check and they pooped out and quit.

I'm not - nor have I ever - supported piracy (not even yours).

You'd have to admit that the real problem here is that your client wasn't "deprived" of anything other than their own greedy inaction. They could have put the clamps on who they were selling to in the early 2000's and they didn't. They wanted to eat their cake and afterward, have it too by selling to the general public. Obviously, they weren't paying much attention to the regular CD music world that sold to the public as they began closing down like dominoes falling. Or thought they were somehow impervious to it. But they were busy enough because if I remember correctly, it was the mid 2000's when they were hit with a number of different copyright lawsuits right? When in deposition testimony, an employee claimed; [paraphrased] "Derek Slep said that it was 'cheaper to pay the penalty afterward than it was to pay for permission in advance."

And now, well over 6 years later (and 16 years too late), The company gets tanked (for what? Could it be copyright infringement... again?... really? say it ain't so!) and NOW wants a contract every single product... that little number was already out the barn door wasn't it?

Brilliant!
I don't offer excuses for you, you can dream up a zillion of them on your own. (You are currently on excuse number 7 and counting, am I right?) The problem is that it is painfully apparent that the Slep's must be slow learners. Those tracks (created after 2007) were STILL sold to the general public. The phrase "special kind of stupid" comes to mind....

And now you've been spouting that you want all your sales to go to "licensees" right? About 9 years too late for you and 16 for them.

Purchasing the assets is one thing – acting like the new company has been making karaoke tracks for over 20 years, is another. You are trying to actively ride on the coattails of the – now defunct - company. Phoenix entertainment partners did not make nor have they ever made, any of the discs before 2007. Or even after 2007. But you whine about your lawsuits like pirates have stolen things made by Phoenix entertainment partners. They didn't "make anything" and they haven't been a "supplier" of anything they've made.

Which is about as ridiculous as claiming that Phoenix entertainment partners has manufactured chartbuster karaoke products for 20 years as well – and that their products have been stolen from them too. It simply is not the truth, and you know that.

And you know full well that you are suing on a technicality – which does not seem to be a legally sound position according to the 7th District – and that was the sole purpose for your purchasing the trademark for chartbuster karaoke. Which reminds me; why haven't we seen a single lawsuit for the chart buster trademark? With all the different formats of karaoke songs, that would be a pretty tough one to prove. Wouldn't it?

Well thank you for putting words in my mouth, but once again – you are wrong. But I find it amusing that you speak the words for me and then you want to point and accuse me of those very words – that originated from you. Talk about a strawman!


Please quote the portion where you claim I am "coming clean about standing on the side of piracy" because that's just another one of your (many) fabrications.
I was not surprised. In reading your latest motion, that once again you are blaming the court system for not understanding the law. That is, the law as you would like for it to be interpreted. Too bad for you.

Bad guys? Nah. Reduced to little more than trademark trolls? Absolutely.

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DJ Don

Please don't pretend to be so thick.

The license-back was for the back catalog, which Slep-Tone continued to sell until 2014. It was not an inconsequential deal. Piracy among the commercial operators you're supporting deprived Slep-Tone of a huge number of sales.



Except that you are. You're openly rooting for people who profit from pirated material to get away with that. You're encouraging pirates to continue their piracy, on this forum and elsewhere--and you're helping them do so.

I doubt if that (piracy) caused SC as big a loss as you think. I would bet that if they (KJ's) weren't able to steal it (the music), they would not have purchased it either. The torrent sites (and IRC's too) along with hard drive sellers are the real bad guys. The KJ's just got caught up in it...... after all "what difference does it make" now!

Had you attacked the illegal distributors and embraced downloads, you'd still be making music. Something we would all be be happy with.

Your own description was the license back was an agreement that allowed slep-tone to sell ONLY DISCS to professional KJ's. This means that except for the very few disks that were produced after 2007, everything else was simply dumping old back catalog inventory onto the market.
Excuse me? What do you call the "help license?" It's nothing more than a "Pirate's license." You are not only encouraging the Pirates to "continue their piracy" you are profiting off them at the expense of the customers that actually purchased the product. There are no altruistic or magnanimous gestures being offered by your company - you don't care who you get money from or screw in the process. So it looks to me like you are the one who is actually "rooting for the Pirates."

Obviously you have confused "rooting for people," with "rooting against you." There is a difference, but I wouldn't expect you to be able to discern it voluntarily.

Nobody likes a pirate, and everybody hates a troll. It appears as though you're the only one to comfortably reside on both sides of that fence.

This is literally too stupid for me to respond to.



This is almost, but not quite, as stupid as the first sentence. Under your interpretation, every license ever issued by any IP owner is a "pirate's license," because without a license, the activity is piracy.

We encourage people who are using counterfeit products bearing the Sound Choice trademarks and trade dress to become a paying licensee.

You, by contrast, encourage people who are using counterfeit products bearing the Sound Choice trademarks and trade dress to find ways to continue using those products without paying for it.



Where did you get the idea that we claim to behave altruistically? We have been very clear from the beginning that we are fighting against piracy because pirates stole from us, and we intend to force them to pay for what they stole. It's true that legit hosts are harmed by this piracy also, so we believe that fighting against it helps legitimate hosts, but we've never claimed that we're not in it to recover the money that was stolen.

You might be right about that, but the fact is that they did use it, they are using it, and they're making money from it. If you're going to do that, the very least you can do is pay the ridiculously low price we charge for that use.



Here is where we part company. Yes, I agree that torrent sites, IRCs, and hard drive sellers are bad guys. Torrent sites and IRCs tend to be based overseas, where it is virtually impossible to reach them. If a major industry like the film industry is unable to shut down torrents, what hope does a small company have of doing so? Zero. Going after hard drive sellers--which we've done with regularity when it makes sense to do so--is like trying to eradicate a hotel bedbug infestation using a pair of tweezers. It cannot be done effectively, no matter how many resources are put into it.

Where we part ways is in your suggestion that KJs bear no responsibility for piracy. I can leave some room for partial innocence because the reality is that our culture does not particularly value intellectual property, so there is a lot of willful blindness. But if you stop for even a short moment and think about things: How do you think karaoke music gets made? If you steal it, who will pay to make it in the future? KJs that steal music and use it to make money are, in fact, "bad guys."



Doubtful. "Embracing downloads" is something we wanted to do, but there was no way to do it legally, because the music publishers were uninterested in issuing licensing for downloads on economically reasonable terms. Plenty of companies embraced it illegally, and some of them are paying the price for it now.

"...every license ever issued by any IP owner?" Not at all, just the "help license" you offer. Once again, you want to pretend you know what my "interpretation is" like you are some kind of "swami mind reader" because it suits your agenda. Nice try.

Your company promotes piracy by encouraging those to "steal the whole Chalupa" by illegally downloading, pirating and using the entire back catalog and commit copyright infringement - for one convenient monthly fee.

In a nutshell, your company encourages and licenses the theft of IP (copyright infringement) from other rights holders in exchange for a monthly payment and your "covenant not sue" which simply makes that - protection & hush money.

No integrity, and no ethics, not a shred.

"counterfeit products?" Your trademark although embedded, is inconsequential to "the product" and you therefore "license counterfeit" remember?

When would I have done that? In sharp contrast, I not only don't use the brand (counterfeit or original), I have "encouraged" others not to use the brand entirely. Your suggestion that I would encourage anyone under any circumstances to continue to use anything with your trademark on it is patently false and only goes to show how low you would stoop to attempt to discredit me. It really is laughable.


So is pirate the new label for "technical infringers" that were formally known as "customers" because they actually purchased the product?

You don't seem to have a problem suing them for "not bothering to ask permission" and they are lumped into the same lawsuit as pirates who never bought a disc but you freely license their piracy on a monthly basis.

Good Show! You have finally managed to openly sprinkle your well-poison all over your own customers in broad daylight.

So, you don't have a problem suing the customers that bought the product rather than the people that stole from them to begin with.... BRILLIANT!

Isn't that cute? You think that anything we say, pro or con, has had any impact whatsoever on whether people "steal the whole chalupa."

I have news for you: There were millions of instances of pirated SC tracks in commercial use long before we ever offered the HELP license. People are going to steal it no matter what we say--it's an immutable fact of life.

Nothing you say is news. I find it quite interesting that you would continue to sue "technical infringers" (read that as "customers") with your boilerplate piracy lawsuit if you have "millions of instances" of verifiable piracy.

Whether it's an immutable fact of life or not, encouraging piracy by "licensing it" Is not going to reduce piracy at all – as a matter of fact, it will simply increase it So I'm not surprised that you would try to justify your promotion of piracy and copyright infringement for a convenient monthly protection fee, while at the same time telling KJ's and the court system that you are out to "reduce piracy" like you are some sort of victim.

I also find it quite interesting that there appears to be one manufacturer of karaoke tracks that doesn't seem to have a problem obtaining licenses from publishers when it comes to streaming and/or downloading tracks for sale. But apparently when it comes to you, publishers are far too demanding, expensive, etc.

Perhaps you poured a little too much poison down that well over the years too?

It must be nice to be able to go through life, unburdened by the need to stick to the facts.

All of the licenses we're presently negotiating include the right to sell downloads. TODAY, getting licensing for downloads is not a problem. That was not the case five years ago.

Just going to leave this right here....

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-Chris

Now this i can actually believe. The Music publishers are notoriously slow to embrace new technology in my limited experience.

I will leave my personal opinion on HELP out of the dicussion, as I have already stated my position on several forums. No need to beat that dead horse. I have also stated several opinions on some of the despicable practices that the music industry practices that anywhere else would land someone with a lengthy jail sentence but that isn't relivant to the current discussion at all

James

I left this out of my previous response because I thought it might be a good illustration of why I say that you support piracy. Perhaps you can respond to my actual statements and questions instead of what you imagine I must be thinking, and in the process convince me that you don't actually support piracy.

Why do we sue "technical infringers"? We don't seek out people we believe have 1:1 correspondence and sue them to force them to comply with the media-shifting policy. If we have reason to believe that someone actually does have 1:1 correspondence, we don't sue them. Period. There are certain characteristics that we look for in our investigations that tell us whether someone owns their discs or not. It's only an approximation, but it has been right more than 99% of the time.

That means a handful of people have slipped through the cracks. I am OK with that for the following reasons:

(1) Every disc we have ever sold includes a warning against making unauthorized copies, right there on the face of the disc, so it's not like we've hidden this policy. "Don't copy" was our policy for many years until the policy became "don't copy unless you follow the media-shifting policy."
(2) Every time we serve a lawsuit on a KJ, there is a letter that informs them that they will be promptly dropped from the suit if they can show 1:1 correspondence.
(3) We have honored the policy in no. 2 every single time the KJ has shown 1:1 correspondence, without fail.

It is simply a fact that there are millions of pirated Sound Choice-branded karaoke tracks in commercial use. There are more than 30,000 active karaoke operators in the United States. Even if only half of them (15,000) had pirated SC tracks and an average of 200 pirated tracks, that would be 3 million pirate instances. In reality, the average pirate KJ we identify has more than 8,000 pirated SC tracks, and the piracy rate among KJs we investigate exceeds 90%.

Obviously you have a problem with us suing people who turn out to be "technical infringers," even though the number of such defendants is fewer than 10 out of 1500 defendants. Your line of argument seems to be that unless we can screen out 100% of the "technical infringers," we shouldn't pursue any litigation at all.

What I can't tell by looking is whether this is:
(1) genuine concern on your part about "technical infringers," or
(2) just something you talk about to try to beat us up.

If it's genuine concern, let's talk about that. What steps should we take to do a better job of avoiding suing "technical infringers"? Since that's been one of our goals from the beginning, we're happy to listen to anyone's ideas. (This is particularly true because the cost of investigating, suing, and certifying a "technical infringer" is something we can't recover, so we'd like to avoid it if possible.)

We're all ears.

I suspect, however, that you don't have genuine concern for anyone other than Chip Staley, and you know that as long as you exile SC from your operation, we're not going to sue you. Oh, you'll try to avoid the question in part (1) by saying, "I don't work for you," but that's a cop-out. Or maybe you'll say, "You shouldn't be suing anybody because nobody cares about your brand," but that, too, is a cop-out. A wide majority of karaoke operators, pirates included, view our products as the best ones to use, and they vote in that poll by which tracks they choose. I've been to hundreds of karaoke shows over the last 7 years, and in all that time, I've been to exactly one that didn't use any SC tracks (it was a country bar, and they played 90% Chartbuster). Almost all of them used at least 50% SC. Many used 90% SC. Our brand is extremely popular.

So what you really mean when you spend all of this time attacking us and "helping" pirates get away with it--which is something you've done with great frequency over the years, such as by falsely claiming that we gave blanket permission for media-shifting years ago, or by encouraging pirates to fight us rather than getting legal and helping them organize bogus defenses--is that you want pirates to be able to operate without having to worry about being sued for their piracy, whether you're prepared to acknowledge it or not. All of that impotent rage you've directed at us is intended to have an effect. Whether the intended effect is simply the end of PEP (as revenge for your having to drop all those systems and take a day job) or a desire to clear the decks for the infringers, the result is the same. We're the only ones out there standing between legality and unrelenting piracy. If your goal is to take us out, that's pretty much the same thing as wanting pirates to win.

So, if you disagree, show me.

Don't bother to rehash your old claims about how unethical I am or what a crappy company we are. I'm not interested.

Show me what it is that you do to oppose piracy, and show me how the fury you aim at us serves that cause.

And yet to date, not a single track has been made after repeated promises over the last 6 years and even taking money in advance...

Not one.

Ever.

It seems to me that the only thing that actually does happen quickly with PEP is check cashing.....

I have not been on here for a few months therefore I am not really up to date with everything.

Is it true that most all 'pirated tracks', at least those from HD sellers and torrents, are downloaded at a considerably less rate than the 192 kbps PEP is requiring for HELP license?

Chip, if that is so, then PEP is not really supporting Pirates, at least not of their material. The host would have to delete any tracks of lesser quality (Though not necessarily human ear audibly inferior) to qualify for a HELP license and go through the audit which would display whether or not if tracks from other manus are of lesser quality, therefore pirated. If other manus tracks are truly pirated, which PEP has no control over, then at least it will be apparently manifest that that particular host may be one they wish to keep an eye upon in the future.

I read you a lot, Chip, and can not help but agree with you a lot in what you say, but I find it hard to believe that PEP has not covered themselves nor will not cover themselves in future rulings, since going after pirates appears to be their main source of income and fear type tactics. Lack of production is certainly apparent and not a source of income. I wish them to have some success in the endeavor of law suits. If only because I have paid for every track I own and I want to take advantage of Karaoke Hosting prices to increase which should occur as pirates are dealt with.

I have no tracks under 192 and most all are 320. My numbers may be wrong. I am not looking at my laptop. But nothing below that.

BTW, Purple Frog Karaoke in Ft Collins informs me that he is totally legit with all tracks. That makes 3 of us in CO that I now know of. The nearest bar to my home runs all karaoke off youtube and nothing legit. He makes what I have been making.

Mr Harrington, as a lawyer, has got to love to banter with Chip. What better way to get incessant practice to argue a legal point !!!

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You can never argue with a crazy mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mind ----B. Joel
I have great faith in fools; My friends call it self-confidence ---- E.A. Poe
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity ----E.A. Poe
I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference! ----A. Einstein
Double bubble, toil and trouble ----W. Shakespeare & Walt Disney
I hate it when I get on FaceBook ----Me
Karaoke might be Groundhog Day ----?
Of All the Martial Arts, Karaoke Inflicts the Most Pain ----?

I have to disagree here. The fact that a KJ does NOT own the original discs (to match up with the downloaded song tracks), and chooses to/is forced to enroll in the PEP HELP program, translates into (at least to me) PEP is supporting a Pirate (for a monthly fee). So, in the long-run, PEP may be making back the money (for SC CDG Sales) from these people who never paid for them in the first place, but they (PEP) are willing to look the other way with regard to the fact that these people still have every other Manufacturer song track pirated as well. So, in a round-about way, PEP IS supporting piracy because they are NOT putting these Pirates out of business.





But it doesn't look like prices will increase for your average Karaoke Host because these Pirates who PEP is dealing with are NOT being put out of business (see my above comment).