"Where's our money?"

C|Net has an article today titled, Artists to music labels: Where's our Napster money?

You know, all things considered, the word 'Napster' in that headline is probably redundant.

Jay Rosenthal, legal counsel for the Recording Artists Coalition, a group representing the interests of music artists said that the labels have told him that they are trying to decide how to divvy up the money and have been sending payments for a while. He's skeptical to say the least.

"If anything has been paid so far, it has been minimal," Rosenthal said.  "The labels are always going to try to hide the money or use some self-serving formula when they finally get around to paying the artists."

But a source within the music industry said that the talent managers aren't looking at the realities.

First, who could deny that the Napster and Kazaa cases, which lasted years, didn't run up massive legal bills, the source asked.  Also consider the "inordinate amount of time" it takes to collect the money and figure out which artist's music was infringed, the source said.  He added that the labels must split the money between scores of performers.

"The lawyers get their cut first," said the source.  "Then the money has to be split among hundreds of different artists at each of the labels."

Sounds to me like the "source" just proved Rosenthal's point:  "The labels are always going to try to hide the money or use some self-serving formula [...]"  Hands up, anyone who believes that the record labels had to go outside and get hourly-paid lawyers instead of using their own salaried legal departments.  95% of their "legal costs" exist only as internal billing fictions.

Shiny picture goodness

Icicles are nothing new if you live in a northerly climate.  Our new house turns out to have an inadequately insulated roof¹, leading to some pretty sizeable ones.

( This is one of the cooler ones. )

[1]  A problem which we're going to have to address when money and weather permit, probably by having the roof re-insulated, although there is also the air-gap tandem roof approach.

More doubts about Prozac

Recently, Prozac and related SSRI antidepressants were dealt a blow when it was made public that Eli Lilly, Glaxo-SmithKline and the other manufacturers of the drugs had failed to disclose data from unfavorable clinical studies that showed patients using SSRIs had an increase as much as four to one in suicide risk.  Now, a new study from Hull University, using the data submitted to the FDA to gain approval for the drugs, has found that for most patients, SSRIs are no more effective than a placebo.

Eli Lilly, of course, defends the drugs' effectiveness; and another researcher, the head of psychopharmacology at Bristol University, says that "if they provide some sort of placebo benefit, this shouldn't be discounted."

Now, the thing that immediately occurs to me is this: If you have the choice between a placebo that is medically inert, and has no side effects that aren't psychosomatic, or a drug that performs no better than the placebo, but has a vicious side-effect profile and may quadruple your likelihood of suicide ... aren't you better off with the placebo?

Clarification:

I should point out that I have not read the studies cited; I have only read summaries.  My intention here was not to discuss the studies per se, but rather to question the idea that it's still a good idea to use a drug with known severe side-effects for it's placebo-like effect if it's (allegedly) no better than a placebo.