For those of you who aren’t in the know, Ray and I are both avid photographers. Not only that, but we also sell prints of our work. (Hint! Hint!).
Alas, neither of us has made enough money from our print sales that we can each afford our own Marla Maples. (Yet.) This simply will not do. In an effort to maximize our revenues, we will now be subjecting all future print sales to the following conditions:
- You agree under penalty of death (or close captivity with Joe Clark), that you are purchasing our prints for your personal enjoyment only.
- Should you display our prints outside of your personal domicile, and particularly in a commericial setting (e.g. doctor’s/dentist’s office), you acknowledge that there will be an additional licensing fee.
- The licensing fee starts at $100 per year, but will scale upwards depending on the volume of traffic at the display location, the nature of the display location, and the number of healthy offspring you have with organs that can be sold on the black market.
- No signature is required to enforce this contract—simply being dumb enough to give us money for the print in the first place is all the legal justification we need for our lawyers to hound your shade through all eternity.
If you think this is a bit far-fetched, then you may want to sit down and have a chat with one of Canada’s pissed-off dentists about how they’re being shaken down by the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN). SOCAN considers a dentist playing a CD they have bought and paid for in their office to be not only a copyright infringement, but a great opportunity to screw even more money out of a loyal customer.
What a bunch of clueless morons. I would never treat a customer like this and expect repeat business. I was thrilled when a local chiropractor purchased some of my prints to display in his office as this represents promotion of my work to potential future customers. Indeed, I think of this as the gift that keeps on giving (and it has).
People will hear a song playing in a doctor’s office and like it enough to go out and buy the CD—that’s just common sense. The inability of SOCAN to grok this basic concept exposes them for the greedy bunch of retards that they are. I’m hoping that they will somehow come to their senses and back away from this issue.
In the meantime, I’d love to see Canada’s dentists fight back by refusing to provide any sort of treatment to SOCAN employees and members. Period. Let’s see how they feel when their teeth become as rotten as their ethics.
Thursday Jul 29/2004 @ 05:51 AM in Ottawa