Question to Sony: Are you licensing or selling those songs?
Sony: It depends on who is asking. Are you an artist or a customer?
According to Yahoo! News (via BoingBoing), Sony is being sued for treating incomes due to internet download of songs as normal record sales rather than song licensing. This means that artists receive 4,25 cents per song instead of 30 cents. However, when a user downloads a song, the indications are the opposite: “you are buying a licence and thus not the same rights as in a normal record sale”.
Sounds a lot like the mexican saying “Jalisco nunca pierde, y cuando pierde, arrebata” (“Jalisco never looses, and when it looses, it seizes”). Some decision has to be made on which way it’s gonna be. Probably the contracts will be seized corrected to give 4,25 cents to artists on song licensing, or else Jalisco would loose.