Universal Music Group Chief Executive Doug Morris sat down with Reuters on Tuesday, and discussed his views of the changing music business, and his insistence — in the age where digital songs are shared — that artists be properly compensated.

Universal, the world’s largest music company, which is owned by French media giant Vivendi, earlier this month filed a lawsuit against popular social networking site MySpace, owned by News Corp., for infringing the copyrights of thousands of artists’ works. 

Listen to Morris talk about a class he recently taught, where he asked the student if they had shared music. He says that kind of activity is “not a victimless crime” and uses the demise of the Tower Records stores chain as an example. “The record business doesn’t get any sympathy,” he says.

Reuters: What do you think of the issue of public performance rights, which could be the next hot-button issue, as online karaoke sites gain popularity?

Doug Morris: The people who write music deserve to be paid for their compositions. The also should have some say about how their compositions are altered. I think that people are very lax about the respect that people should have for other people’s works. I hate…to see these groups work for two years, making an album spend enormous amounts of money, putting their creative juices into something that’s $9.99 in Best Buy and people would rather have it for free. For me, being a music person it’s very hard to watch that. 
   
How excited are you about some of today’s advertising based models which in some ways make music free?: 
Doug Morris: We are trying them. But it doesn’t make it free. We wouldn’t do it if the artist, the writer and the people involved in the creation weren’t going to be paid what we expected them to be paid. Whatever brings in enough money to protect our artists and protect the creative people are going to support. My job is to protect my company. And the only way you are going to do that, when it is besieged with people who are taking your music and not realizing they are committing a crime, is to try and get all sorts of different income (streams). 
    
Would consumers fell differently is prices were lower?
Doug Morris: If you buy a book its $25, it’s just not as easily stolen. This is really a bad thing and it’s going to end up eating a lot of things, its going to eat up a lot of the intellectual product of the United States and of the world … the stealing of the intellectual property. That’s a big statement but I do believe that.
 
What about all the lawsuits?
Doug Morris: I hate being in the middle of this, I don’t want to be seen as the ’suing chairman’ or anything like that. But I am not going to allow any of the people to infringe upon the rights of these artists and songwriters. That’s my job. and I am going to get money from the people who are creating businesses based on their backs.

The idea of the lawsuit was to put an element of risk into a person like me who was jimmying the phones when I was 18 years old. Until the court system really makes it clear by these lawsuits, its one step at a time until we are able to harness the revenue that they deserve and that we deserve.  

See full stories from Reuters Media Summit:

Universal Music CEO sees best ever sales, profit in ‘07
Universal Music may seek royalty deal with iPod
Universal Music sees settlement with MySpace

(Updates with photo)