Pilloried by the RIAA
p2pnet news view | music:- Why are Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG using the likes of their RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) to bludgeon their own customers with vicious court cases?
Aren’t they creating huge amounts of negative publicity, driving people away and creating a new consumer base of people who want nothing to do with the corporate music industry?
Yes, Yes and Yes. But they simply don’t care. They believe as long as they keep on pouring money and legal and political resources into their campaign to dominate how and by whom ‘product’ is distributed online, they’ll win. Eventually. The rewards are staggering, as they already know. They’ve been reaping them offline for decades. What matter that a few million malcontents fall by the wayside? There are plenty more young consumers waiting in the wings.
They’re the ones that count and they’re being carefully groomed and relentlessly ‘educated’ to accept dross as the standard and to believe black is white, if that’s what the Big 4 tell them.
Get ‘em while they’re young in a carefully orchestrated international campaign utilising every area of society from public and private schools, through government administrations, to the law courts.
Or, as RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy says in a fascinating and revealing Q&A with Bruce Gain in TG Daily, the lawsuits are “a necessary part of a larger equation”.
Lawsuits have been counter-productive
“According to the latest statistics from the RIAA, there were over 7.8 million households in March 2007 in the U.S. that illegally downloaded music versus 6.9 million households in April 2003, when the litigation campaign began,” says the post.
“However, while this number suggests that the lawsuits have been counter-productive there is also the fact that the broadband penetration rate in the U.S. has also more than doubled since 2003.”
John Palfrey, a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School and executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Charles Nessor, William F. Weld professor of law, Harvard Law School, and founder and faculty co-director, Berkman Center, are among academics who are strongly criticising the corporate music industry for the ongoing attacks on students in universities across America.
The fact the lawsuits are seriously disrupting classes doesn’t matter a damn to the RIAA.
“I don’t think [the litigation] has made a meaningful dent in how much piracy goes on among American young people, TG Daily has Palfrey stating. AAnd I think it continues to represent a signal that the recording industry is out of step with the future, and frankly out of step with the present as well [...] But it is more importantly, I think, a distraction from finding the way forward in a digital age.”
Pilloried by the RIAA
The story mentions the case of disabled mother Tanya Andersen who, with her ten-year-old daughter, Kylee, was pilloried by the RIAA in a bloody-minded attempt to force her to say she’d been illegally distributing copyrighted music online.
With her lawyer, Lory Lybeck, guiding her, she flatly refused to be cowed and is now suing the RIAA.
“Ms. Andersen, who had never heard of the songs and artists she allegedly pirated then offered to surrender her computer as proof that she had not downloaded the files,” says TG Daily. “But instead, the RIAA’s continued to litigate with same zealousness as if it were going up against a large corporation.
“Ms. Andersen’s eventual legal victory is but one example of other dismissals of RIAA cases, which were dropped after over a year of depositions, trials, and numerous other time-consuming procedures the defendants were subjected to but not compensated for. Federal judges have rejected RIAA’s legal claims in federal courts in Oklahoma, New York, and in Michigan.”
But, “From the view of the RIAA, it is unlikely that the litigation will end anytime in the near future,” says the story, which also quotes Lybeck as saying, “They [the labels] know what they are doing. They are not going to wake up one morning and say ‘oh, gee, there is a new method of distributing music’.”
Massive litigation campaign
Meanwhile, “[Studies] show a continued sense on the part of American young people that file sharing may be wrong on the law but it is acceptable as a moral matter,” Palfrey says in the TG Daily story, which adds:
“The artists who stand to lose money are often hardly advocates of the massive litigation campaign, either. Rick Mason, for example, the drummer for Pink Floyd recently told this writer how he believed that artists need to be paid for their work, but that lawsuits were the wrong approach.”
Instead, “artists’ compensation should increase with new music distribution methods,” says Lybeck.
“They should let the music authors actually share some of the profit, which [the RIAA] has had a strong hold on in the distribution scheme for 50 years. There is a whole new distribution capability, and the [RIAA] guys are not needed – and they know it.”
There’s an end in sight
As p2pnet posted in 2005:
P2p is here to stay and without wishing to be corny, the people have spoken, and loudly. When the various corporate interests finally admit they’re operating in the digital 21st century and not the physical 1970s, things will settle down. As Cherry Lane Digital ceo Jim Griffin said recently, the labels, “cling to their pursuit of this notion of control and calling those who do not comply thieves, and in doing so they leave billions on the table that should be divided fairly amongst creators and rights holders.” The companies won’t be able to leave those billions floating around for ever. Their contracted artists and shareholders won’t let them. So Yes, there’s an end in sight and when it arrives, we’ll have the labels and cartels saying how they’ve been solidly behind p2p since day One.
We also said:
… let’s remember consumers are customers again, and they’re in a spanking new economic territory which has never existed before. They, and not the corporations, have the power of control. It’s called freedom of choice. New technologies always threaten the old, established ones whose owners do everything they can to maintain the status quo. Eventually, though, they cave in, and go with the flow and peace reigns (until it happens all over again ; )
Stay tuned.
JN
Also See:
TG Daily – RIAA says lawsuits cannot be the complete answer to music piracy, July 23, 2007
ongoing attacks on students – RIAA student victimisation campaign, July 21, 2007
pilloried by the RIAA – Tanya Andersen sues the RIAA, June 25, 2007
posted in 2005 – Slyck interviews p2pnet, February 22, 2005
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July 24th, 2007 at 10:27 am
As much as I hate the RIAA bastards, I think they are indeed winning.
Overall, the fair use arguments and the rights of people are falling on deaf ears and the little is getting successfully trampled on. A few people win against them. The vast majority don’t and meekly pay the extortion fee.
Lets face it, if someone likes a song, they’ll get it, off p2p or on CD or whatever. They are not really gonna give a flying fuck about lawsuits against anonymous people, are they?
And most of the uni’s are in the pocket of the RIAA. They simply fall over themselves to nail their students for the RIAA. Government is obviously the main RIAA sock puppet and more and more, laws and frameworks are being put in place around the world to serve their interests – just look at how allofmp3.com got nailed. The alternatives that have since sprung up are now on the run and the whole thing looks shady to most punters, who will stay away. allofmp3.com was a brilliant opportunity, which the music industry squandered, to force their monopolistic and callous practices on the great unwashed.
I think the new generation will indeed like the music of tomorrow, no matter how crappy it is (and it really is crap already). They will have grown up in the internet age and have been taught that p2p is “bad” and that there are all these nice legal DRM’d music sites they can get shafted on and they will lap it up. They will never have known any of the freedoms which our generation had.
It’s time to stop being in denial people and fight these bastards together as one.
July 24th, 2007 at 10:35 am
To Shitman:
Boycott RIAA shit: 20% down!
Take that you piece of crap!
This is for the Santangelo!
Few more yeare and you are gone!
Your turn to go to court. . . the criminal court this time! You criminal!
July 24th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Be ready for the artistic big-bang of the 21 first century.. . Without the RIAA!
These parasites businessmen fucked the art in the 20th century! Thanks to them 97% was craps!
Because of them the 20th century was a desert full of rubbish shits marketed to death and monetized to the rope:
stupid lyrics of few words that does not make sense and does not even rime repeated at nauseam
(such as hey, hey, you, you!), stupid rock and rock&roll music made out of 4 notes when luky, with
simplistic rhythms that have more to do with jack-hammering than music, stupid “”Classical”"
by a suck-up such as Pierre Boulez in which we don’t know when the musicians start playing or
when they stop tuning their instruments, stupid abstract painting that represent nothing,
stupid sculpture that look like a drop from a garbage truck, Ugly Building like the world
trade center that from the outside look like a gigantic cage to store chicken!
This is what greed did to the art of the 20th century.
But in the 21th century the artistic big-bang has begun thanks to internet and is likely to at least
equal but probably surpasses even the 19th Century. Thanks to internet the greed is out of the picture and the artists are once again directly in contact with their fans. No more marketing, no more bullshit. Now the people decide and the true artists will trieve.
And you the music cartel you are fucked! We don’t need you!
July 24th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Ummmm…
Pink Floyd’s Drummer is NICK Mason, not Rick.
July 25th, 2007 at 7:57 am
Doesn’t the attitude of the RIAA and MPAA fit pretty well with the mindset today? The current thinking is “grab as much power as you can” and that means forcing people to do stuff even if it is meaningless stuff. 20 years ago the mantra was “have a finger in everything” and that saw the rise and fall of big conglomerates, financial giants like Gulf and Western than ultimatly failed and broke up. Before that is was simply “get all the money you can” and we saw the goofy Gold Parachutes and such. Of course these ideas never die completely but there seems to always be one silly mindset that stands out and suposedly smart government and corporate suits follow it blindly. Isn’t that what Bush is doing right now? And its a repeatition of what some companies did 60 year ago. At one time the phone company was seen as a law to itself. A guy with a toolbelt could practically force his way into your house if you were suspected of having an “illegal extension”. Competition has killed that foolishness and it will eventually kill the current “power graB”. What new sillyness awaits us in the next decade? Might be something even worse. Meantime, these characters can no more stop “file sharing” or “piracy” than they killed “smut” in the 50’s, of recreational drugs, or extra-marital sex or even speeding in your car. Billions of dollars wasted on these hopeless campaigns to alter human nature. Maybe its a necessary part of civilisation and we just don’t know it. Anytime people are asked to voluntarily change their behavior so their lot becomes worse solely for the benifit of an already rich person or organisation the result will be failure.