So I’m betting on a 12,000 total on cancelled subscriptions….with another 12,000 who bought the magazine at the check-out stand. And figure 300 guys throughout the US who are picking up the cover and turning it around backwards at the checkout stand. So you toss in another 3,000 who won’t see it and just pass on by. Thats a fair number of folks to lose to, and you probably won’t make this back up.

The exec in charge? I’m betting they leave by January and take a year off.

Unless and until they announce from a European stage that they’re ashamed of their president, they haven’t quite equalled the Dixie Chicks.

OTOH, I wasn’t contemplating buying more of their music even before I heard this, so … easy for me to say, I guess.

If the proper fees have been paid, the Wilson sisters can’t stop anyone from playing their song, no matter how mad it makes them. What I don’t like is that this will mean more royalties for them.

Operation Chaos continues.

If I buy their CD, it’s now my property…I can play it anywhere I want, and as loud as I want, as long as I’m not violating local public-disturbance laws.

The CD is your property, but its contents remain — legally at least — the intellectual property of the copyright owner.

I don’t know for sure whether that can be applied to a song’s use at political events, as long as the party or campaign is making its royalty payments to the appropriate royalty-payment clearinghouse (usually, I believe, BMI or ASCAP), but artists have no qualms about talking to the media as if they can veto such use.

My own comment about earworming “Barracuda” was, of course, entirely satirical.

Disclaimer: IANAL!

But I am appalled by the arrogance of the editors, who assumed on the basis of nothing, that the Governercuda would vanish from the ticket. (Recall Churchill after Hitler’s failure to ring Britain’s neck like a chicken: “Some chicken; some neck.”)

To GWR: I’m no intellectual property lawyer, but I worked in the book publishing industry and know a bit about the subject since there were times I had to get authors to track down permission to quote from song lyrics, movies, etc.

Insofar as I know, yes–you have every right to play your legally purchased CD or legally downloaded iTune whenever and wherever you want, as long as you aren’t in violation of local noise ordinances.

As for stores, bars, dance clubs, etc.: If they’re playing music from a radio or music mixes they have created from their own legally purchased CDs, they should be in the clear, just so long as they are not charging patrons for the “privilege” of listening to the music. In other words, you’re paying for the beer, you’re not paying for the music when you enter the bar. And the same goes for the football game on the bar TV. (Which is why the NFL always puts in that copyright notice during one of the commercials.)

My local supermarket has music playing constantly. If they’re playing “Piano Man”, it doesn’t mean Billy Joel is endorsing Shop-Rite.

I guess we’d need an opinion from a good intellectual property lawyer to know for sure.

“it is completely false that we are losing 10,000 subscribers.”

Yes we have only lost 9900 readers so far, so the 10,000 number is COMPLETELY false.

“When Us went to print Monday night, it looked like the ticket was falling apart” says one magazine editor. “They went to print thinking Palin was dead in the water,

Talk about living in a vaccuum. What, why would anyone think that this ticket was “falling apart”?? What kind of idiots are leading these magazines??

I have never really liked Heart anyway. Even when I worked at the head shop, oppps sorry the “tobacco” store, LOL , I would never listen to them. Their music was just so boring. Much like the Stones, and Aerosmith, and an assortment of others that pretty much sounded alike. – Lorica

Can they…?