p2pnet - rss feed: The RIAA and Chicken Licken
p2pnet.net news view:- “Does anyone really believe the RIAA when they tell us that ‘the sky is falling’ from rampant piracy?”
No one does, including the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) or its masters, EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and Warner Music (US).
But their lawsuits aren’t about copyright infringement. They’re about regaining control of their formerly compliant consumer bases whose constituents are showing an alarming tendency to think for themselves; and, establishing complete dominance over how, and by whom, music is distributed online.
Our intro is the opening sentence in a ZDNet OpEd by an unnamed editor. It goes on to suggest the decision by EMI to abandon DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) consumer control may be a “chink in the RIAA armor”.
EMI is so far the only one of the Big 4 organised music cartel members to see the light, but it won’t be the last and anyone who’s been online for longer than 10 minutes has known the RIAA would eventually have to drop the ridiculous sue ‘em all marketing campaign it’s been implementing on behalf of the major labels.
That was never in question and the sterling efforts of master manipulators and expert spinmeisters Mitch Bainwol and Cary Sherman, the two men running the RIAA, notwithstanding, were it not for the fact many important elements of the mainstream media owe their survival in one way or another to the entertainment cartels, the campaign would have died long ago.
“The premise of RIAA claims is that piracy costs the recording industry money due to lost music sales but that premise assumes that those participating in the piracy would otherwise purchase the music if they couldn’t ’steal’ it,” the ZDNet editor goes on. “I believe this is a false assumption.”
This, too, is something online music lovers have known since Day One. As soon as EMI announced it had lost heart in DRM, it was inevitable its opposite numbers would sooner or later do the same.
“Ultimately, piracy only becomes a problem for the music industry when a third-party makes money off of that piracy instead of the rightful owner of the material,” says the OpEd, adding:
There is no convincing evidence that those who are being targetted by the RIAA (predominantly, college students) are making any money off of on-line piracy.
So who is? The people making money off of on-line piracy are peer-to-peer service providers. Peer-to-peer services have many legitimate uses but some of those vendors are targetting those who would use their services to pirate music. Others provide free software designed to quietly share music without the user’s knowledge. These deceptive practices endanger their users in far more deceptive ways than anything the RIAA is doing.
The actions of the RIAA are heavy-handed and intended to intimidate users but they are direct. These peer-to-peer vendors are preying on the innocent. If the RIAA had the courage of its convictions, they wold be pursuing these vendors - not students.
The anonymous editor doesn’t say which vendors he has in mind, but IMHO, they’re not the problem, either. They’re merely supplying a demand created by the Big 4 themselves.
At the beginning, the people behind the RIAA, and all the other so-called big music trade organisations, decided they’d be able to milk the online download market in much the same way they’re able to gouge the offline one.
They established completely unrealistic wholesale prices ranging from 60 to 85 cents for each download, forcing the hopefuls trying to sell corporate music product to charge equally bizarre retail prices.
Predictably, the vast majority of online music lovers aren’t having any.
The Big 4 claim there are some 300 corporate sites selling “legitimate” downloads. But that claim is as nonsensical as the suggestion that there’s a viable corporate online music market. There will be, one day, but that won’t happen until the labels stop treating their customers as potential criminals, and start charging reasonable wholesale prices.
As things stand, there’s not the slightest suggestion of competition in the corporate world. All the so-called “legal” download stores are selling the same product at pretty much the same prices.
Apple’s iTunes is now routinely mentioned as a raging success, the site all the others wish to emulate. However, it can be only recently that it moved out of its slot as a loss leader for iPods. And even now, one might wonder how much of a profit Apple is actually making, not that it cares as long as iTunes continues to act so effectively as a consumer-funded front-end loader for iPods.
Apple boasts it’s sold some two billion iTunes since the start in 2003. However, there’s never been any kind of breakdown of this figure and it’s presented as factual in much the same way RIAA claims, known to be complete fabrications, are presented as factual.
Meanwhile, the true online music market, the one created and maintained by independent musicians and entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes, continues to thrive, and as more and more people open Net accounts and start their own blogs and web sites, the ability of the corporate world to control the flow of information, the one single factor which has allowed them maintain their dominance, is collapsing, and for the first time in history, People Power is becoming a serious factor.
That’s the chink in the armour.
Jon Newton - p2pnet
(Thanks, Julie)
Also See:
ZDNet OpEd - Is EMI the chink in the RIAA armor?, June 4, 2007
aren’t having any - 1 billion songs a DAY shared online, March 8, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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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!
