We’ll keep on suing you: RIAA
p2pnet news | Freedom:- Minnesota mother Jammie Thomas is the first RIAA victim to actually get to tell her story in a civil court before a jury.
Through their RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, the members of the Big 4 organised music cartel, swear she and some 29,999 other ordinary Americans are among millions of customers who are “devastating” the industry.
Even kids are criminals and thieves who are robbing the labels blind, they declare.
The CrunchGear picture on the right says it all.
And they’re doing it by sharing music with each other and/or by ripping CDs they bought and paid, is their spurious claim.
Jennifer Pariser, one of the RIAA’s star witnesses, is billed as “the top litigator for the Sony-BMG Music Group” and, “when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song,” she stated unequivocally during the trial, slated to end today.
Does that mean the venal Big 4 plan to sue every one of the countless numbers of people around the world who’ve copied their own CDs for whatever reason?
‘We’ll win in the end’
It doesn’t take a genius to arrive at the conclusion that the RIAA must be losing money hand over fist as it pursues its black and bitter war against its owners’ own customers, a reality confirmed by Pariser who admits Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG have no idea how much money, if any, they’re losing to file sharing.
What will happen if the jury votes against labels?
Nothing.
Because Warner, et al, don’t care how much they spend or how many court decisions go against them.
Thousands of other innocent people will be victimised, and with the bulk of the corporate mainstream on and offline print and electronic media as their mouthpieces, they’re under the mistaken impression they can’t fail to win.
The farcical sue ‘em all campaign has been going on since 2003 with RIAA targets, including very young children, being quite literally terrorised by threats and inundated with demands for money under what amount to legally sanctioned extortion.
Of all these people, no one has yet been found guilty of anything and Thomas was the first to actually appear in court.
Yet to read the mainstream media, one would think thousands of people have been successfully prosecuted for the non-existent crime file sharing.
The authors of their own distress
“We think we’re in for a long haul in terms of establishing that music has value, that music is property, and that property has to be respected,” Associated Press has RIAA president Cary Sherman stating.
The Big 4 and all the other RIAA-like alphabet organisations they operate claim dwindling sales are down to their customers, whom they call criminals and thieves and whom they lump together with the real crooks, the individuals and gangs who run rings around the industry, using physical corporate product as templates to make counterfeits and duplicates for sale on undergrounds around the world.
The Truth, however, is: the labels are the authors of their own distress.
They flatly refuse to acknowledge business models created for the physical 1970s don’t and won’t work in the digital 21st century.
But it doesn’t matter. EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and Warner Music (US) plan to use brute force to gain control every aspect of how music is distributed on- and offline and they don’t care how many people they hurt or how much money they spend doing it.
Don’t Buy Big 4 ‘Product’.
But for the first time in their history, the cartel members are fighting a losing battle.
P2P is here to stay and it doesn’t matter how much money they spend, there’s nothing they can do about it.
More and more people are signing up for Net accounts every day and in the process, they’re discovering realities the Big 4 would rather they didn’t know.
The mainstream media are no longer the only sources of news and information and the ranks of new consumers – men, women and children who’ll go to any lengths rather than buy overpriced, low quality corporate ‘product’ – are swelling hour by hour as more and more people open accounts and log on.
The solution is simple and can be summed up in five words —
— Don’t Buy Big 4 ‘Product’.
You won’t see ‘reports’ or ’studies’ explicating how many sales have been lost as consumers in their millions turn away from the former music masters.
But it doesn’t matter.
We know.
And they know.
Meanwhile, the Jammie Thomases of the world will be made to suffer needlessly.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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October 4th, 2007 at 7:39 am
Well said!
October 4th, 2007 at 10:44 am
Eventually, they will (probably) win. They will realize that attacking the future leaders of the US (see university students) is a losing strategy. They can then turn to damage control and (probably) convince us not to hate the thought of paying them in the future. However the old guard may need to retire first…
October 4th, 2007 at 11:40 am
As I just said to someone in an email, I think, bottom line, it doesn’t matter what anyone says – judges included. The labels will keep on hammering away until they’re absolutely forced to stop —– by their shareholders.
Cheers!