Perhaps its just me, but when I read about the UMG/Megaupload thing I can't help but thing that UMG did this an intentional stab against a rival/competitor and alleged piracy service, hoping that no one would notice, but someone did notice.
Now instead of owning up to anything (let's face it, the music industry has never been one based on honesty), they are going to dig in their heels and try to deny everything, eventually pegging the blame as a 'clerical error' on some intern or lower management?
Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but I haven't seen anyone on the side of UMG make any salient points that would show otherwise.
Isn't "clerical error" essentially the same excuse that Kenneth Lay & friends made about the frauds perpetrated by Enron? In that case, they alleged that intentional bad acts were carried out by employees and that the executives had no knowledge of their activities. This prompted new law stipulating that company executives could no longer claim ignorance of illegal activities by employees as a defense.
Is "clerical error" the new refuge of this same mentality? "We can't claim they broke the law without our knowledge, but we can claim they made a mistake." Can we, and should we, make this similarly illegal? Or should we stike closer to the core issue, where executives may be lying about their knowledge of fraud/mistakes to deliberately take advantage of any benefits that may arise from them? Is this even practically enforceable?
Anybody can claim anything, that's the whole point of an adversarial judicial system. ideally the other side will poke holes in the defense's argument.
One, perhaps worthwhile, change would be to tie penalties to income. it's impossible for a corporation to do jail time. $100,000 would be a lot for most people, but for many corporations this is a tolerable sum. being held accountable for, say, up to 10% of revenue would get some attention.
In anti-trust cases the EU has fines tied to the earnings of a company. I believe they can go as high as 15% so for large corporations like Microsoft it can become quite the sum. I believe Microsoft were fined 1.5 billion euro before they gave in to the demands.
A corporation is not its board members. To put the board members in jail, you would have to try them. What you're proposing would be a major overhaul of the criminal justice system.
After yesterday's article about not making petty technical corrections of peoples' choices of words, I hesitate to say anything, but you should, at most, say "the major recording industry has never been one based on honesty". It is still probably an overstatement but at least it removes a whole slew of hard working people who you probably do not mean. We work with over 200 record labels, thousands of artists, dozens of venues, and partners across the industry, and nearly all of them are cool people of high integrity.
Now instead of owning up to anything (let's face it, the music industry has never been one based on honesty), they are going to dig in their heels and try to deny everything, eventually pegging the blame as a 'clerical error' on some intern or lower management?
Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but I haven't seen anyone on the side of UMG make any salient points that would show otherwise.