David Byrne Sues Florida Gov. Charlie Crist For $1 Million

David Byrne is suing the governor of Florida, alleging that he used the Talking Heads' 1985 single "Road to Nowhere" without permission or proper licenses.

Byrne is seeking $1 million in damages from Gov. Charlie Crist, who's also Florida's former Attorney General, and his senatorial campaign for use of the song earlier this year in a website and YouTube ad attacking his then-Republican primary opponent, Marco Rubio. Crist has since changed his campaign and is running as an independent candidate.

The suit (Case Number 8:10-CV1187-T26 (MAP)) was filed early Monday afternoon in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida in Tampa.

Byrne tells Billboard.com that he became aware of the Crist ad from a friend in New York, where the Talking Heads co-founder resides. "I was pretty upset by that," says Byrne, who had Warner Bros. Records contact the Crist campaign, which subsequently stopped using the ad. But, Byrne contends, "in my opinion the damage had already been done by it being out there. People that I knew had seen (the ad), so it had gotten around. The suit, he adds, "is not about politics...It's about copyright and about the fact that it does imply that I would have licensed it and endorsed him and whatever he stands for."

Rap killed the other music genres on MTV in the late 80’s-early 90’s.

Some knuckleheads complained that MTV wasn’t playing enough black music, and you know very well just how potent the race card is. MTV caved.

I used to love watching MTV in its early days, but when they switched the majority of their videos to rap, that was the end for me.

While rap was a dead end street, it had something that the rest of pop music lacked—no association with the big record labels.

One of the worst ideas of the suicidally bad ideas produced by the RIAA was that MTV should pay huge royalties for the privilege of showing music videos that were commercials for the RIAA.

This fits right in with the RIAA business paradigm that the record companies should get all the money from music, at zero cost to them. None for the artists, none for the print media, TV or radio stations. The RIAA wants every dime.

For years they had included a contract clause in music contracts that the composers and artists were nothing more than “fee for hire”, so deserved no royalties of any kind. Essentially minimum wage slobs. But they had not enforced that clause. So they got congress to pass a special bill to insure that no artist had any claim to anything, that the record company didn’t freely give them. That the clause was still good.

Now they are pushing congress to pass a law that radio stations can’t air their music without paying huge royalties as well. On top of that, that anyone airing music, even public domain music, should be assumed to be airing copyrighted music, and have to pay royalties for it, unless they could prove that the music was public domain after the fact.

They also want to overturn the old ruling that cassette and VHS recording of copyright material for personal use should be legal. That all music is essentially their property.

Holy heck. I don’t think that even demons in Hell could be that insanely greedy.

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