Oh let the laughter ensue raucously on this one folks.
Seriously how ridiculously stupid do you have to be to not only steal music from the very people you are suppose to be representing, and protecting, but then to get caught doing it.
It all started back in 2006 when Dutch performer Melchior Rietveldt was approached by the anti-piracy group BREIN to write a score for an anti-piracy video which he was led to believe would only be shown a a local arts festival.
Well it turns out that his music found its way on a large number of retail DVD’s as the background music for the anti-piracy lead in to the movie. Rietveldt only discovered this because he heard it playing on the Harry Potter DVD he was watching. Now according to some numbers being floated around his music could very well have ended up onto tens of millions of discs.
It was Rietveldt’s financial advisory who informed him that had he been properly paid for the additional use of his work he would have seen a payday of around one million Euros.
Now this is where insult gets added onto injury because when Rietveldt tried to contact the local group responsible for collecting these types of royalties he was ignored. It wasn’t until he was contacted by the local BREIN representative Jochem Gerrits with a proposition. or rather what amounted to a shakedown.
You see Gerrits, who also owns a record label, offered to intercede on Rietveldt’s behalf to get his money if Rietveldt agreed to pay Gerrits 33% of whatever was retrieved. Apparently the reasoning behind this arrangement as Gerrits told Rietveldt’s financial advisor was that without his help Rietveldt wouldn’t see a dime so he deserved a cut for his help.
And the music industry wonders why people don’t trust them further than they can spit in a headwind.
via Geek.com / TorrentFreak
