RIAA wants your fingerprints: Not content with asking for an arm and a leg from consumers and artists, the music industry now wants your fingerprints, too. The RIAA is hoping that a new breed of music player which requires biometric authentication will put an end to file sharing.
How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop: An interview with Public Enemy's Chuck D and Hank Shocklee
Shocklee: [...] The first thing that was starting to happen by the late 1980s was that the people were doing buyouts. You could have a buyout - meaning you could purchase the rights to sample a sound - for around $1,500. Then it started creeping up to $3,000, $3,500, $5,000, $7,500. Then they threw in this thing called rollover rates. If your rollover rate is every 100,000 units, then for every 100,000 units you sell, you have to pay an additional $7,500. A record that sells two million copies would kick that cost up twenty times. Now you're looking at one song costing you more than half of what you would make on your album.
Chuck D: Corporations found that hip-hop music was viable. It sold albums, which was the bread and butter of corporations. Since the corporations owned all the sounds, their lawyers began to search out people who illegally infringed upon their records. All the rap artists were on the big six record companies, so you might have some lawyers from Sony looking at some lawyers from BMG and some lawyers from BMG saying, "Your artist is doing this," so it was a tit for tat that usually made money for the lawyers, garnering money for the company. Very little went to the original artist or the publishing company.
