Talk:International Federation of the Phonographic Industry

message: This was initially a stub. Having the official IFPI publications and history at my side and the history of the record and radio industry in the UK, I have created an initial article. Like all Wikipedia articles it is subject to change. I intend to return to add to, amend or whatever and I invite you to do the same. It is my intention to document everything and I would ask any editors who are interested in contributing to do the same. If you see a statement that I wrote which seems to lack supporting documentation, please ask and I will do my best to supply what I have. In the light of the activity taking place in the name of this organization I thought that it was high time that a light was shone upon it so that everyone has an idea of who they are and where they have come from and possibly, where they are going. MPLX/MH 05:56, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I have now added a lot more material to this new article. I am looking (misplaced at the moment) for two other IFPI publications which I have (in addition to the two already listed), plus a several articles about the collapse of the American music industry and the creation of EMI. As soon as I find this and other related material I will add it to the aritcle. MPLX/MH 19:55, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Further update: I have now added a lot more to the reference section and added new sub-sections and many new links which has spawned many new stub articles. I am now in the process of trying to locate an article that I have from the 1930s concerning the death of the American recording industry which was blamed upon the growth of American commercial radio. General Electric shifted its interests in this area to Britain to make use of the draconian copyright laws which were used as a form of censorship. It was not until fairly recently that a "P" symbol began to appear on American records. If anyone has a small copyright "P" symbol there is a place in the existing text where one is required. Simply search the article for "P" and swap them out. I am still looking. MPLX/MH 23:04, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: New article

message: From the article:
Actually, according to its website, its intentions are:
* Fighting music piracy
* Promoting fair market access and adequate copyright laws
* Helping develop the legal conditions and the technologies for the recording industry to prosper in the digital era
* Promoting the value of music in the development of economies, as well as in social and cultural life
Nothing about promoting members products or attacking technologies. Now, it may well be doing the things you say, but they do not appear to be stated intentions.  -- Dcfleck 02:18, 2005 Apr 13 (UTC)
::If you are going to quote from the article then please do so in context. The article actually states:
Copyright enforcement
Today IFPI remains a highly controversial trade organisation that is involved in high profile litigation. It represents 1450 members of the recording industry in 75 different countries. Its stated intention is to promote the products of its members while using the copyright laws to attack new techologies or any means of distribution it has not licensed. IFPI now maintains its international secretariat in London and has regional offices in Brussels, Hong Kong, Miami, and Moscow.
:: 1. It is a highly controversial trade organisation that is engaged in high profile litigation. The news headlines of April 12 stated that on April 13 its USA affliate member will begin suing a lot of new people over claimed "piracy". (You also agree that stamping out what it claims is piracy is its objective.)
:: 2. It does represent 1450 members of the recording industry in 75 different countries. (That is what IFPI claims.)
:: 3. Its stated intention is to promote the products of its members while using the copyright laws to attack new techologies or any means of distribution it has not licensed. (If you want rock solid proof and documentation for this statement I will gladly attach that to the paragraph in question.)
:: 4. IFPI now maintains its international secretariat in London and has regional offices in Brussels, Hong Kong, Miami, and Moscow. (That is what IFPI claims.)
You added:
Actually, according to its website, its intentions are:
* Fighting music piracy = which is a highly subjective and controversial word - as the quotations by people such as Cat Stevens and George Harrison demonstrate.
You added:
* Promoting fair market access and adequate copyright laws. = Isn't it interesting that Wikipedia is also promoting fair market access without resorting to the copyright laws which have been subjectively applied by IFPI and its members?
You added:
* Helping develop the legal conditions and the technologies for the recording industry to prosper in the digital era = This is not true. It fought the offshore stations of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and it also fought the Tandy corporation; it fought against DAT and on and on. That is the opposite of its stated claims. I have the files and I will gladly reference the news stories with sources and dates.
You added:
* Promoting the value of music in the development of economies, as well as in social and cultural life = This is not true either. See the quotation by Don Pierson regarding the record companies. Read the comments of the artists. IFPI has a separate royalty from the mechanical end of manufacturing and that is what it is protecting. IFPI never got a foothold in the USA until the 1980s but it still lacks the teeth that it has in Europe.
You added:
Nothing about promoting members products or attacking technologies. Now, it may well be doing the things you say, but they do not appear to be stated intentions.  -- 
::Promoting members products is what IFPI does! It is a trade organization promoting manufacturers. It was formed by General Electric manufacturing interests which came to include EMI at one time. It was formed in fascist Italy and the next year it brought a test law via its driving force British affliliate with a suit against a pub owner playing his radio in a bar in Bristol, England! If you had been listening to the news today then you would have known about the big lawsuits being filed by its USA interests tomorrow! MPLX/MH
Sigh.
Look, all I was doing was pointing out that what you said the IFPI's stated intentions are, and what (as far as I can tell) the IFPI says its intentions are, are different things.  It does not matter if the IFPI's statements are a pack of lies - you are misrepresenting what they say they are doing.  That is why this article has NPOV problems.  Your dislike of the organization oozes from every paragraph.  This piece reads like an anti-IFPI editorial, not an encyclopedia article.
I think there's a decent article in here, but it needs to have the anti-IFPI tone removed, and a fair amount of apparently extraneous and irrelevant information removed; e.g., what possible relevance does it have to the IFPI that the word "station" appears in the U.S. Declaration of Independence?  
-- Dcfleck 13:01, 2005 Apr 13 (UTC)
:To answer your specific points:
1) By the SAME reasoning the article is not supposed to be a duplication of IFPI material. It is supposed to balance all views. That is the intention here. It shows IFPI views, the facts on the ground and it also shows the opposite views. Read again what Jimbo had to say. An article about an organization is NOT supposed to be a duplication of their own web site.
* Yes, but Saint Jimbo also said(emphasis added).  It's when you try to add "the facts on the ground" that you slip into trying to write what is so, which, as the quote indicates, is where people let their biases show.
2) As for the reference to the Declaration, that is because the word "station" (which means location) has taken on a POPULAR supposition that it has no meaning so that a radio station is a general name for, let's say, the BBC as an organization when in reality it means the place, the geographical location of where the organization is located. Same for a railway station - it is a place where trains stop. The Declaration refers to a place, a geographical location, "stations of the cross"; "battle stations"; "action stations" all do the same thing. The foundation of the UK broadcasting laws (different from the USA laws) has to do with location first placing the location under UK government control. The USA laws are not based upon this concept because of the constitution and specifically the prohibitions against the government contained in the first amendment. MPLX/MH 13:30, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Same song

message: Actually, the only usage of the word station in the Declaration of Independence is  This is "station" in the sense of "position or rank among independent countries; position in human society", not "physical location". (For some reason, Wiktionary's definition of "station" lacks this usage, but any other dictionary should have it.)
I will try to take a section of the article and rewrite it in what I would consider NPOV; I'm handicapped in this in that I don't know much about the topic, but I'm willing to try to put my copyediting skills to the test. Then we can compare the differences between the versions and see if we can come to some sort of understanding. -- Dcfleck 13:11, 2005 Apr 16 (UTC)
:You miss the point in that a location is also a position and this is why it is a variation of the meaning when applied to railway station (for example) and has more in keeping with "stations of the cross" or "battle stations", or "action stations". When applied to radio station within the meaning of the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949 as constantly amended and incorporated within various British laws, this is exactly the intended meaning. The law is divided into four key parts: 1) no person can establish a station for the purpose of setting up a radio station without a license; 2) no person can use a station (ditto); 3) no person can install equipment at a station (ditto); 4) no person can use the equipment at that station (ditto). US broadcasting laws are founded upon an entirely different foundation resting on the "We the People" concept of the Constitution. The UK which has no written constitution is built upon the Crown controlling everything and then apportioning out its authority through acts of Parliament (since 1688). The word station means a location, position, and it is geographical in nature. But in all instances it is a position which is a location. You further miss the point by quoting:
:"...it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them,..."
... because unless the penny has not dropped, the location is Earth - the Globe and the People are located on the Earth which means that it means exactly what I said that it means - it is talking about a geographical location because the position you mention is a position on the Earth as being both separate - very specific and equal - all the same. I am not standing on your head and you are not standing upon mine. We are both standing upon separate but equal bits of the Earth (planet.) Note that it is referencing the Laws of Nature and Nature's God - not Jesus Christ, or Moses, or some other human deity. It is discussing Nature. The "position" you are referencing is a totally artificial concept created by human beings, but the basis for all interpretations is geographical in nature. MPLX/MH 15:45, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Geography

message: I have created a page containing a sample rewrite of the beginning of the article at Talk:IFPI/Temp. The biggest single problem I had with the article is the fact that much of the information listed here I consider to be irrelevant - or if it is relevant, its relevance is not substantiated. -- Dcfleck 14:31, 2005 Apr 16 (UTC)
::Having taken a look at your proposal we might just as well turn IFPI into a stub and then delete the stub. There is nothing to explain why IFPI was created, or what its agenda is. So you send the reader back to square one with no information on IFPI and yet this past week its affiliates were launching more high profile law suits in the USA. It was IFPI that created Needle time which begat the career of John Peel on Wonderful Radio London which IFPI branded as a pirate radio station to which millions listened and led to the controversial last day of broadcasts with the biggest stars lamenting its closure while IFPI said that it represented them. It was IFPI that shaped the music policy of the original BBC that led to the creation of Radio Luxembourg in the 1930s. Behind IFPI was General Electric that was accused by Congress of creating a worldwide monopoly and so it created EMI to escape US laws, only to run into WWII. The kids who were previously sued over music file sharing do not know what hit them and how IFPI came to redefine the word "pirate". IFPI caused the closure of the original Napster and so on and so forth. So if the idea is to bury knowledge then let's just blank the entire page now and be done with it. MPLX/MH 15:45, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There is a big difference between gutting the article so that it no longer contains information and many making changes. Of course anyone can make changes - you included. If you feel that by gutting the article and removing information that it will improve the article, then why discuss it here? What you are looking for is approval of your viewpoint and I have expressed my own viewpoint to you here. But you are hardly asking for consensus when your intention is to remove information so that knowledge will no longer be available. MPLX/MH 16:29, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: How to erase an article

message: This article should be under International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. IFPI should be a disambig, as this is also the acronym for the International Federation of Pirates'(sp?) Interests.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.162.38.121 (talk) 12:34, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Info here. The Pirate Bay strikes again, but IFPiratesI is not notable enough for inclusion (so no disambig needed). --h2g2bob (talk) 17:16, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Even if the international federation of pirates interest is not notable enough for inclusion that does not counter that it is policy to name pages about organizations or objects by their full name not abbreviations. Naming convent and a more specific convention about abbreviations note that unless it is almost exclusively known as the abbreviation such as NASA or RADAR and it is widely known and used in that form the title should be the phrase spelled-out. I certainly doubt that the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is widely enough known to meet this criteria. WikipedianYknOK (talk) 21:22, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Acronym shouldn't be the lemma 

message: The IFPI and RIAA are bureaucracies that have not yet facilitated compliance with United States truth-in-advertising laws vis-a-vis the entertainment industry.  What this means is that other industries such as International Paper Company can/have been secretly/privately vote to put original music in the marketplace, as example.
Note:  the organization does not spell out its acronymn on its Internet website.
Marcia L. Neil/beadtot  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.239.212.18 (talk) 06:04, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  the well-intentioned IFPI 

message: In a blog post in Swedish, Rasmus Fleischer points out that a previous version of this article contained a statement about IFPI's first meeting being held in 1933 in fascist Italy, but this was removed by IP 195.40.39.2 that can be traced (wikiscanner) to IFPI's headquarters in London. --LA2 (talk) 20:45, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Please do not re-insert the statement into the article without adding proper sources. Or else your edits will be reverted, and for a good reason. Had I thought that reinserting the statement would have been a good solution, I would have done so instead of writing the piece above. This article does need good sources, good background research, because the organization is controversial, and not only in this decade. --LA2 (talk) 08:12, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

text: The blog post has now been translated to English. -Ahruman (talk) 10:11, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Despite a fruitless search I have been unable to find any mention of whether IFPI was a puppet of Mussolini.  It was certainly formed in 1933 but registered in Switzerland.  The BIEM was formed in 1929 and acts as an umbrella group for all performing rights artists.  This looks like warring now, but unless sources can found it could go on forever.  There is no way an unsourced claim can ever be used on Wikipedia. BpEps - t@lk 12:47, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: No one claimed that IFPI was "a puppet of Mussolini". The blog post in question only claims that IFPI tactically used the corporatist policies of the Fascist state to push their demands, which seems to have prevented and alternative proposal from musicians' unions to get enacted. Julmust (talk) 20:38, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

text: I don't doubt the google book source but look at these edits:
Are we to infer that an organisation having a first congress P76 Music and Copyright in a totalitarian state is somehow hand in hand? that's what I get out of prose like those above. -- BpEps - t@lk 20:52, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

text: TorrentFreak has reported on the IFPI supposed fascist roots:  --hello, i'm a member | talk to me! 01:18, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I do not think it matters that much how anyone else draws "conclusion" from it, but as a matter of fact, the history of the IFPI is important, and once it is verified, this information should go into the article as soon as possible.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.108.103.172 (talk) 16:45, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: If Fascist Italy is always used when talking about Italy during that era, it could be used, otherwise it just adds a certain bias.btw, the ifpi simply removed the italy reference, the fascist reference was removed long ago.ACookr (talk) 00:10, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

text: Why this talk about Hitler? Why not just let it be written on the page that IFPI was founded in Italy in 1933? That's nothing strange with that, and there's no need to even use the word "fascism". It's stranger indeed to NOT have any mentioning of IFPI having any history whatsoever. Julmust (talk) 07:39, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Why? Because Mussolini wouldn't appear half as bad, hadn't it been for Hitler. All through the Cold War, the Soviet propaganda used the word "fascism" to collectively describe Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany (and Fraco's Spain). This is the association an average reader might make if we only whisper the word fascism. Only the very careful reader will understand that Rome in 1933 probably was quite an uncontroversial choice of location. For example, the German sentiment against the Versailles peace accords might have made it impractical to organize the meeting in Paris. And I assume the German recording industry was represented in Rome in 1933? Which other countries were there? Did any discussion about the choice of location take place at the time? This is an interesting piece of history, especially in the larger context of international tentions between the world wars. --LA2 (talk) 11:51, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  Answering your question, the congress "was attended by industry leaders from Germany, France, Italy and the UK", according to Simon Frith's book. Anyhow, that doesn't matter much for the question discussed here, which is: Should the place (Rome) and time (November 1933) for IFPI's founding be mentioned? If you don't agree, I hope to see an argument for keeping the article strangely ahistorical as it is now. Julmust (talk) 12:32, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the article needs a complete rewrite. Will you do it? --LA2 (talk) 14:10, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I started a new History section, fully referenced. I hope this is sufficient to build on. I didn't broach the subject of fascism; I didn't see it in the sources I checked. I did, however, put the IFPI's role in the 1961 Rome Convention into context by using one source's info about how there were conflicting interests between the IFPI (the recording industry), the authors & composers, and US broadcasters. —mjb (talk) 05:14, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

text: Like Bp & ACookr in their posts above, I disagree and don't think fascism should be mentioned at all. Your examples aren't good comparisons; Louis XVI was a critical part of the French Revolution, and there's an obvious link between the U.S. Marines and their historical antecedents, so it's OK to imply an association between those topics. Mentioning fascism and a historically reviled dictator in the IFPI article would likewise imply an association of the IFPI with those subjects. Unless we can find credible sources to the contrary and can explain in the article exactly what the connections are, we need to keep such implications out of the article. —mjb (talk) 00:24, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

text: But they didn't remove any reference to fascism; they removed a reference to the IFPI being founded in Italy in 1933, which was something that was written in the context of an apparently erroneous statement that the full name of the organization was one thing from 1933-1974 and something else from 1974 to the present. Other examples of conflict-of-interest editing that's worthy of being mentioned in the articles themselves are all much more egregious examples of sanitization than this, and have better reliable external sources to back them up. —mjb (talk) 00:24, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fascist Italy 

message: What about adding some text about the incident in the article? It would perhaps be a good thing to tell people that IFPI has edited the article about itself, in a way so that it *smalls* better? After all, they DID remove they reference to fascism, no doubt. (I whois'ed the IP.) Crakkpot (talk) 23:56, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: But they didn't remove any reference to fascism; they removed a reference to the IFPI being founded in Italy in 1933, which was something that was written in the context of an apparently erroneous statement that the full name of the organization was one thing from 1933-1974 and something else from 1974 to the present. Other examples of conflict-of-interest editing that's worthy of being mentioned in the articles themselves are all much more egregious examples of sanitization than this, and have better reliable external sources to back them up. —mjb (talk) 00:24, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Adding the incident to the article? 

message: A Research article in English by the author of the blog post has now been published. 
Mreftel (talk) 21:29, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Research Article 

message: According to http://torrentfreak.com/ifpi-erases-evidence-of-fascist-roots-for-75th-anniversary-080408/
parts of the article were removed concerning the IFPI history. Noian (talk) 00:02, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Old news, and discussed at length above. —mjb (talk) 03:02, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Protection/Reverting Article? 

message: If these are the official ifpi policies, they should be referenced. The only stated anything on the ifpi site are their 'Missions': "Promote the value of recorded music - Safeguard the rights of record producers - Expand the commercial uses of recorded music" (see IFPI About page ), why aren't they reproduced in full here?
Futher on they can then be called to task about how exactly they are performing on these missions, how valuable their promotion is, how safe those rights are, how useful this expansion really is.
Of interest also is the waybackmachine's archive of that page, where you can see the changing missions.
*strange how this article is (edit: was) so small, they've been pretty controversial for a while now..
ACookr (talk) 00:40, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  policies / missions 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I would suggest to re-arrange this as a table, which can be sorted on the columns, like other tables on wikipedia. Right now this is just a list, which is simple but not as useful as a table, IMO. 2A02:8388:1604:F600:3AD5:47FF:FE18:CC7F (talk) 09:37, 4 June 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't agree (yet), unfortunately. What do you want to sort on? It's already sorted chronologically, and the rest is just text for each milestone. There's a tag on the section now (with which I somewhat agree), suggesting it be converted to prose. This makes me think that at least somebody(s) would prefer to move away from a table-like arrangement. Right now, I don't see any benefit to a table. — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 12:33, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

text: As JohnFromPinckney wrote, a table is the worst solution. There is nothing here to sort by. Personally I think "Milestones" sections are promotional nature and should be merged into the History section in prose. --Muhandes (talk) 13:15, 4 June 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Milestones