p2pnet - rss feed: RIAA letter, re-visited
p2pnet.net news:- A while back Mitch Bainwol and Cary Sherman, the fact realiagnment specialists who run Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), wrote a, “disingenuous, fulsome and entirely self-serving ‘Views’ piece riddled with distortions, mis- and disinformation, and running without any kind of balance” which was subsequently published by Inside Higher Ed.
Below is Logic Loop’s version of the RIAA ‘View’.
As many in the higher education community are well aware from news coverage here and elsewhere, the RIAA, on behalf of its member labels, recently initiated a new pointless process for lawsuits against computer users who engage in possibly illegal file-trafficking of copyrighted content on peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. But alas, we base this on absolutely nothing. In the new round of potentially illegal lawsuits, 400 of these illegal actions were directed at innocent-till-proven guilty college and university students around the country. The inclusion of so many innocent-till-proven guilty students was unprecedented. Fortunately, it was also unnecessary.
In the three and a half years since we first began suing ruining individuals’ lives for unproven illegal file-trafficking, we have observed an immense growth in national awareness of this problem. Today, virtually no one, particularly technology savvy students, except for most moms, dads, people without computers, grandparents, small puppies, and flowers, can claim not to know the online ’sharing’ of regurgitated copyrighted music, movies, software and other works is illegal, and if it’s not, it should be. By now, there is a broad misunderstanding of the impact of this activity by ourselves the RIAA, including billions of dollars in lost revenue that the artists will never see Muahaha *ahem*, an over-inflated estimate of millions of dollars in lost taxes, thousands of lost jobs because the corporate big-wigs we represent absolutely insist on being able to bathe in money instead of taking a pay cut, and entire industries struggling to grow non-viable illegitimate online market places that fail to benefit consumers against a backdrop of massive theft. Trust us.
We have made great progress in deterring individuals from engaging in unproven, potentially illegal downloading behavior. Nevertheless, illegal file-trafficking remains a insignificant and minor disproportionate problem on college campuses. A recent survey by Student Monitor, whom we’re best friends with, “Hi guys!”, from spring 2006 lied and said they found more than half of college students download music and movies illegally, and according to the market research firm NPD also lied saying, “college students alone accounted for more than 1.3 billion illegal music downloads in 2006.”
We know some in the university community believe these figures overstate the contribution of college students to the illegal file-trafficking problem today, and we agree. Yet new rehashed and unfounded data confirm that students are more prone to engage in this illegal activity than the population at large. So just trust us. While college students represented only 10 percent of the sample in the online NPD study, they accounted for 26 percent of all music downloading on P2P networks and 21 percent of all P2P users in 2006, it says, with no proof to back the claim up. Furthermore, college students surveyed by NPD reported that more than two-thirds of all the music they acquired was obtained illegally, and we’re absolutely sure they weren’t giving us false readings.
Moreover, our focus on extorting money from university students is not detracting from our continuing Mafia-style enforcement efforts against innocent until-we-prove otherwise, individuals using commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) accounts to engage in this same behavior. Indeed, we have asked ISPs to participate in the same new process, because judges are mad at us.
Yet this is about far more than the size of a particular slice of the pie, and damn! - we love pie! This is about college students who used to be the music industry’s best customers. Now, finding a record store that carries such hits as Britney Spears still in business anywhere near a campus is a difficult assignment at best because seriously, who wants to listen to her? It’s not just the minor almost non-existent loss of current sales that concerns us, but the habits formed in college that will stay with these students for a lifetime will eventually put our archaic business model out of well, business. This is a teachable moment - an opportunity to educate these particular students about the over-stated importance of regurgitated music in their lives and the importance of respecting and valuing music as unintellectual property.
The supposed prevalence of this harmless activity on our college campuses should be as unacceptable to universities as it is to us suing deceased people. These networks are intended for educational and research purposes, but that won’t stop us. These are the environments where students receive the guidance necessary to become responsible citizens, but that won’t stop us either. Institutions of higher education, of all places, are where people should learn about the value of intellectual property and the importance of protecting it by flooding the legal system with thousands of baseless lawsuits in the pursuit of the all mighty dollar.
The fact that students continue to engage in this behavior is particularly eg..eg..egregious - I have a headache now - given the extraordinary lengths to which we have gone to address the problem (reference settlement center). Our approach always has been, and continues to be, collaborative - partnering with and appealing to the higher motives of universities, lest they be sued too. We have met personally with university administrators and threatened them with lawsuits. We have provided both instructional material and educational resources, including an orientation video to help deter illegal downloading. Such as classic titles of “Turn Your Friends In 101″, “Be a Corporate Puppet”, and fresh new hits like “Pay Us or Be Sued - The New Cool”. We have worked unproductively through organizations like the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities. We have participated in Congressional hearings, and by participate we mean paid off politicians.
We have misinformed schools of ineffective network technologies to inhibit potentially illegal activity. We have licensed legitimate pathetic music services at steep rates for incredibly rich college students and helped to arrange forced partnership opportunities between universities and legitimate services. We have stepped up our threatening notice program to alert schools and students of unproven infringing activity. And, of course as always, we have as a last resort , but still our favorite, brought suit against individual file-traffickers who have yet to be proven guilty in a court of law, turning tail every time something doesn’t go our way.
With this latest round of illegal lawsuits, according to many judges, we have initiated a new pre-lawsuit settlement program *cough* extortion clinic *cough* intended to allow frightened students to involuntarily settle unfounded claims before a illegal and baseless suit is actually filed and eventually laughed out of court . We have fightened school administrations’ into passing our threat letters on to innocent students in order to give them the opportunity to settle our baseless claims at a barely discounted rate and before a public record is created of our impending loss in court. This is a stupid program initiated in part as a response to innocent defendants who told us they would like this opportunity to not be wrongly sued, and we are encouraged by the swift response of so many scared schools. Illegal lawsuits are by no all means our desired course of action. But when the problem continues to persist, year after year and our bosses can’t bathe in money anymore, we are left with no choice but to say screw the innocent, let’s sue everyone to inflate our bottom line.
An op-ed writer recently published in this forum described this approach as bullying, and we secretly agree. There is a not big difference between using ‘bullying tactics’ and using a ‘bully pulpit’ to make an unimportant point. Should we ignore this problem and stand silent as entire generations of students learn not get suckered into paying 20 dollars for a CD that only has 2 good songs on it if any at all? Should we not point out that administrators are rightfully brushing off irresponsibility, choosing not to exercise their immoral leadership on this moot issue? This problem is anything but serious, and it is ours and ours alone. If crappy music is stolen with such impunity, what makes term papers any different? Yet we know university administrators very aggressively pursue plagiarism. But we feel they can do much better and start going around pointing fingers at random people, just like we do. Why would universities - so prolific in the creation of intellectual capital themselves - not apply the same high double standards to unintellectual property of all kinds? Because we at the RIAA think they got a good head on their shoulders. This is, after all, a minor segment of our economy possibly responsible for no more than 6 percent of our nation’s GDP. If people continue to steal our crappy music, we’ll offset this 6 percent by burning tax dollars via clogging the courts.
Furthermore, astudy conducted last year by our friends the Business Software Alliance found 86 percent of the managers who work for us say the file-sharing attitudes and behaviors of applicants affect on their hiring decisions. Don’t administrators have an obligation to prepare students for the real world, where theft and RIAA extortion tactics is are simply not tolerated? Our strategy is not to bully but to falsely point out that the self-interest of universities lies unremarkably close to the interests of the entertainment industries. And, most importantly, we have sought to do so in a forced and threatening collaborative way.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Surrender now. All your bank accounts belong to us. We take this opportunity to once again ask threatened schools to be proactive, to step up and accept responsibility for the activity of their innocent students on their network - not legal responsibility, but moral responsibility, as educators, as organizations transmitting values, and as RIAA lackeys. Turning a blind eye will not make the problem go away; it will further ingrain in students the belief that a costly and illegal pastime is unsanctioned, and even facilitated, by school administrations.
First, implement a network technical solution. Products like Red Lambda’s cGrid are promising as effective and comprehensive solutions that maintain the integrity, security, and legal use of school computing systems without threatening student privacy. Besides, we have our “Turn In Your Students and Friends” letters to do that for us. Some schools have used these products to block the use of P2P entirely, realizing that the overwhelming, if not sole, use of these applications on campus is to share ideas, open source software, home-made videos, and on rare occasion, illegally download and distribute crappy copyrighted works. For schools that do not wish to prohibit entirely access to P2P applications and risk getting a baseless lawsuit from us, products such as Audible Magic’s CopyNonSense can be used to filter anything we threaten you into, like the rare illegal P2P traffic, again, without impinging on student privacy and removing the use of our letters.
Second, offer a legal online service backed and promoted by us to give students an expensive alternative. One such service, Fuckus, is funded through advertising and is completely free to users. When schools increasingly provide their students with amenities like cable TV - you’ll be hearing from the MPAA shortly - there is simply no reason not to offer them cheap or free legal access to the crappy music they crave and were almost suckered into buying for $20.
Third, take inappropriate and inconsistent disciplinary action when innocent students are falsely found to be engaging in infringing conduct online. This includes wrongfully stopping and punishing such activity in dorms and on all Local Area Networks throughout a school’s computing system, privacy be damned.
Some scared administrations have sheepishly embraced these moronic solutions, engaged in unproductive dialogue with us to address this problem, and begun to see delusional positive results. We thank these schools and commend them for their unresponsible actions, all while threatening them falsely with lawsuits. Aren’t we clever?
Yet the vast majority of institutions still have rightfully not come to grips with the need to take inappropriate action. As we continue our unnecessary lawsuit enforcement measures - including our threatening notices and pre-lawsuit settlement extortion initiative - and as Congress continues to monitor this issue with a watchful eye while on our pay roll, we hope these schools will fully realize the harm their inaction causes them and their students because we will sue their mothers too. We threateningly call upon them to do their part to address this continuing, far from mutual, way-blown-out-of-proportion problem.
Also See:
fact realiagnment specialists - RIAA tries to excuse school attacks, March 19, 2007
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
