Remember the “MIC Coaltion”? We haven’t heard from them in a while but they suddenly surfaced with a vengeance in the form of this letter to the Copyright Office under the guise of “PRO proliferation.”

This is the MIC Coalition membership. The MIC Coalition is dedicated to one thing and one thing only–screwing songwriters as hard as they can. And frankly, anyone else who gets in their way. If you’re good with zeros, you can add up the total market capitalization of all the companies that these trade associations represent and you will be into the $50,000,000,000,000 range.

That’s right, $50 trillion–and all these companies are protected by the government through the longest running antitrust consent decrees in the history of the United States. And who are they protected against? Songwriters. Pullllleeeeeeze.

With one exception: Global Music Rights or “GMR”. And while the letter to the Copyright Office doesn’t come right out and say it, what these people hate the most about GMR is that these behemoths have to actually negotiate directly with GMR rather than hiding behind the government in the rate courts. That’s right, they truly hate that free market. While the MIC Coaltion’s letter raises issues about multiple PROs, the one they really have the wood for is GMR because GMR has an extremely valuable catalog. In fact, if you can judge by comparing private equity placements, GMR–based on true free market licensing–is about 3x more valuable than BMI–based on the government’s crap deals. Which also pisses them off.

You also have to understand that these MIC Coalition people are hugely pissed off about a recent BMI rate court case that applied GMR benchmarks–free market negotiations–to set the government’s consent decree rates. Rates that are supposed to approximate what a willing buyer would pay a willing seller in the government’s version of free enterprise. That case is on appeal right now. You can get a flavor of just how silly this argument is from a post on Artist Rights Watch that discusses the case in detail or read this revealing friend of the court brief from the BMI rate court appeal.

The reason the trillionaires hate GMR so much is because songwriters got together and started their own PRO. Freedom of association, freedom of contract and free to bargain collectively, all quintessentially American values protected by the Constitution. Even though many radio stations settled an antitrust case with GMR resulting in a long-term license, they obviously haven’t given up sniping at the startup.

Unfortunately, the trillion-dollar soul crushers seem to have conned Congress into believing that Big Government is the way to go instead of protecting the free market. The plot sickens.