Here's some good news for people who compose music for the chareidi market. I wonder if ACUM will pro-rate a major percentage of the fees towards those composers.
At any rate, this is big, as both Rav Elyashiv and Rav Ovadya Yosef have endorsed the idea that Dina D'malchusa Dina applies to intellectual property. This is the approach that I have been suggesting for years and it logically extends to other areas of music/intellectual property rights like downloading. It represents a direct rejection of Rabbi Dovid Cohen's allowing people to download/copy songs/sell hard drives full of music without payment to the rights holders.
If the JM industry is smart, they will, as I have been suggesting for years, invest in publicizing this psak and its implications.
