Spanish Copyright Society Raided For Embezzlement 80
esocid writes "Senior officials in Spain's Society of Authors and Publishers (SGAE), the country's leading collection society for songwriters and composers, face embezzlement charges in the wake of a Friday raid on the organization's offices. Investigators say Jose Luis Rodriguez Neri, the head of an SGAE subsidiary called the Digital Society of Spanish Authors (SDAE), made payments for non-existent services to a contractor that then paid kickbacks to Neri and his associates. SGAE, the Spanish counterpart to American collecting societies like ASCAP and BMI, is known for its high fees and aggressive enforcement tactics. According to El País, 'the society has been often accused of exceeding its remit by going as far as to infiltrate private weddings to check whether fees had been paid for the music being played at the banquet.'"
They didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition (Score:5, Funny)
They criticize pirates but can't keep their hands out of the booty.
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Re:They didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisitio (Score:5, Informative)
...The individuals will get off free...
Embezzlement is different than excessive executive compensation and is illegal in most places. Note that TFA says there was a raid and that they face "fraud, misappropriation of funds and disloyal administration" and that a High Court judge grilled him for more than four hours over the charges.
I suspect that they will not "get off free".
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So what you're saying is... (Score:1)
So what you're saying is that the issue is differring views of how a reasonable person might interpret the contract.
Sounds like a civil matter.
/IANAFL
Re:They didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisitio (Score:4, Interesting)
You aren't from Spain, are you?
Even if it's proved that the used the royalties money to enrichen their consulting companies, I will not bet on they entering prison.
At least with politicians it is always more complicated than that.
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Embezzlement is different than excessive executive compensation and is illegal in most places.
Depends on who does it.
Here in Luxembourg, the director of a charity (Transfair) affiliated with the ruling CSV party embezzled funds by buying fake services from her husband (who operates a web hosting company). She didn't get any problems from this...
A couple of month later, a member of parliament of the ill-liked ADR party does the same thing (gets a fake bill from a friend of his who operates an IT business, and gets that bill "refunded" by parliament), and he's sued and it's all over the news.
Moral
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Moral of the story: if you want to embezzle, be affiliated with people in power.
The same is true of most crimes.
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Moral of the story: if you want to embezzle, be affiliated with people in power.
Just be sure that you don't embezzle from people who are affiliated with more powerful people than those you are affiliated with...or that your embezzlement raises a significant risk of reducing the power of the people you are affiliated with.
Hand Wringing? (Score:1)
They criticize pirates but can't keep their hands out of the booty.
People in all sorts of organizations including many worthwhile charities embezzle funds. This situation might be superficially "ironic", but there is really little other connection.
Parent is SPAM (Score:2)
Parent is SPAM
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Except that this association has acted in the last deade with an unlimited greed. They even demanded a play made by disabled people, for they wanted their money.
In retrospective, being so greedy in their work, it seems easy to guess they would be just as greedy in life, so they couldn't get their hands off the booty.
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They criticize pirates but can't keep their hands out of the booty.
Making them privateers [wikipedia.org] outside the bound of their letters of marque, then? I say... hang them.
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Making them privateers [wikipedia.org] outside the bound of their letters of marque, then? I say... hang them.
Might be hard to find a yardarm on their building though...
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They'll just get a contractor to install one for an inflated fee and kickbacks.
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They criticize pirates but can't keep their hands out of the booty.
The captain's parrot got his claw in the tambourine.
--
Avast, nothing to see here. Move along matey.
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Criminal organization does crimes. News at 11.
Seriously, what do you expect from organized crime? (= The record distribution [well, not anymore, that's the point], litigation and artist extortion industry.)
You might want to look the definition of "crime". Hint: it's not "somehing I disagree with"..
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They criticize pirates but can't keep their hook out of the booty.
Fixed for ya.
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Not surprising (Score:3)
This kind of behavior is well-known, and the SGAE and all its branches are known to be leeches by several villages/small cities, they have even disrupted weddings in order to charge people for copyright violation...
Spain loves to imitate the US, but generally half-asses it, so it's not surprising for a RIAA-wannabe to be such a walking disaster.
However, despite everyone knowing they are leeches, they still have free action to do as they please. This will have little effect on their activities on the long run.
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Spain loves to imitate the US, but generally half-asses it
Do you actually know anything about Spain?, because that statement makes no sense.
Beyond the obvious (Eating better, living longer, having clearly different political, institutional, educational and health systems). Spain's message against Piracy is not "don't steal or else", but rather "protect your culture".
The SGAE's "business practices" are indeed comparable to those of the ASCAP, only difference being, the justice system over there can actually do something about it.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you actually know anything about Spain?, because that statement makes no sense.
They've been relying heavily on American investment and northern European (little American) tourism since Franco, like all new conservatives, discovered trickle-up enonomics. This is built on the classical Catholic Spain of a few wealthy business-families enjoying special relations with the powers that be. So, I guess you could say that America imitated Spain, did a very good job of it, and then sold its success back to Spain.
Beyond the obvious (Eating better, living longer, having clearly different political, institutional, educational and health systems).
This is merely legacy. The direction is to the Amerian system. The EU is fundamentally a corporation of corporations in the American style designed to force its members to transfer state/national control to "free competition" amongst private companies. (These freely selected companies tend predictably often to be the same French or German behemoths.) And Spain's official line is that it loves the EU and should swallow its bait along with hook, line and sinker.
Spain's message against Piracy is not "don't steal or else", but rather "protect your culture".
Please justify. Spain is full of self-hate about its recent past while its youth are one of the most alienated in Western Europe. There's a lot of "protect the middle-age who have ridden the first wave of prosperity which ended about 5 years ago", but culture? Nah, fuck culture, everyone in that group was too busy buying second homes until the bottom fell out of the economy.
the justice system over there can actually do something about it.
Coming from a common law nation, I am quite scared by the thought of any justice system which consists entirely of a panel of professional judges. However, I acknowledge that Spain's judiciary has remained more impartial than I would have expected over the past half-century - it's not that the very well-connected won't always get off; it's more that fascist fetish for correct bureaucratic process hasn't been pierced. In Britain, law at this level is little more than ex-public school lawyer buddies having a well-paid debating competition while the jury is hoodwinked and the judge grins on.
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Damn I wish I could give you a +5 informative automatically...
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That's unfair! We don't live only from tourism. We used to live of the housing bubble!
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Spain is full of self-hate about its recent past
The hate comes mainly from people who would like to return to the "good old days" of Franco, and it's not directed at themselves.
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Same goes for the visible heads of the show business, who align themselves with the left parties (the main left party, actually, the one they can reap benefits from) as the cool hip trendy thing to do, while demonizing those that don't. Eg. see what happened to Russian Red when she said that she sympathized more w
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And Talgo has been around since the '40s, way before the tourism boom. If you check out Aravaca you can just about make out the "Avenida del Talgo" sign in the street of luxury[tm] flats to remind you of where work used to occur. There are a few things Spain has done a great job of building, but its contribution is dwindling.
I couldn't give two hoots about military works - especially foreign ones: I've had enough of Spain being the factory and testing ground for flying war machines produced for empires in t
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Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah I happen to live there.
A lot of things are shaped as known trends in the US. It goes from TV to pop culture to business plans, and I have been seeing those since I was a kid, specially in IT where the latest coding trend is the latest coding trend...in the US.
And, anyway, SGAE's "message" against piracy is about protecting culture. But who is buying that? With the spokesmen they have, it's obvious they are there for the money.
Also they are the people that made storage media much more expensive with their digital canon, making production more expensive for amateurs out of their "protection". Indie stuff is culture too. And we are not protected, at all.
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Maybe the poster is Spanish so does not write in US English and used a bit of British slang (half-arsed) there as well - that's why I suspect you can not comprehend what is meant by that sentence while I can. If you do comprehend but just want to show off that you won some spelling bee or something then fuck off and read Shakespear until you understand that perfect spelling and grammar is not really all that important.
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I absolutely disagree with his post, but in his defense, he is also Spanish (judging from the name) and just happens to disagree with the statement.
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fuck off and read Shakespear until you understand that perfect spelling and grammar is not really all that important.
Just because in Shakespeare's time spelling and grammar were in a relatively fluid state does not mean that ignoring spelling and grammar now makes you the equivalent of Shakespeare.
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However, despite everyone knowing they are leeches, they still have free action to do as they please.
If someone disrupted the wedding of one of my relatives for copyright reasons they would be free to count the teeth they used to have.
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I'd like to think more people thinks like you. Our freedoms would be stepped on a bit less often.
Unfortunately hitting such a guy will end with you in trouble, being whistle-blowers, they will probably try to sue.
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Let them go ahead and sue.
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Let them go ahead and sue.
It's not America, they won't sue, they'll call the police and you will be convicted of assault and actual/grievous bodily harm (or whatever the equivalent in Spain is). And all because you have a bee in your bonnet about fucking copyright. Good work, mate!
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I have a bee in my bonnet about people spoiling the most important day of a young woman's life, especially for grubby reasons. And it would still be worth it, even if the judge didn't rule mitigating circumstances, which he or she would. Sometimes a good hiding is just what's called for.
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In related news: IFPI is also in trouble (Score:3, Informative)
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IFPI Boss and CEO Accused of Tax Evasion in Germany http://www.zeropaid.com/news/94106/ifpi-boss-and-ceo-accused-of-tax-evasion-in-germany/ [zeropaid.com] After the SGAE, Germany investigates IFPI and its dome accused of tax fraud http://en.wikinoticia.com/Technology/general-technology/90182-after-the-sgae-germany-investigates-ifpi-and-its-dome-accused-of-tax-fraud [wikinoticia.com]
Now that the US and Eurozone economies are in shambles, they are going after everyone, the bigger the better. In more prosperous times, this would have been swept under the rug for the price of a nice dinner and a movie ($225,000 according to the MPIAA).
It seems no matter how much you pay corrupt officials, they'll still turn on you at the drop of a hat.
Could you Americans please hang a few of them from streetlights so that the ones in well to do Australia remain scared.
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I don't think the people that run these organizations really have any type of ethics to begin with so it's very easy for them to move into truly illegal activity.
Funny, I'd say that people responsible for collecting and distributing royalties on copyrighted material to their owners were just doing a tedious but useful job on behalf of the artists. But, I know, this is slashdot, and if I want to listen to music it is my god given right to do so for free.
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Your sig is oddly appropriate. Modern copyright law is theft by people who do not create or author anything except the very laws which enrich them. To support an enforcer of copyright is to support morally corrupt individuals or corporations.
Nice slanted summary (Score:3)
It seems to me that SGAE is the victim here. They were the ones from whom money was embezzled. The perps are the senior officials within that organization.
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But it's those very senior officials who want things like Sinde's law (a highly illiberal law to shut down any website suspected of copyright infringement with little judicial oversight).
The SGAE is an emergent property of the people it is made up of, organizations only do things the people within them do. The very same people ripping off the artists (which is what embezzling SGAE funds is doing) are the very same people pushing for things like Sinde's law.
"Thieves" and a "miserable failure" (Score:2)
Ladrones [www.sgae.es]