p2pnet news | RIAA News:- I live on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, and when my family and I are having dinner, we often listen to a local CBC programme called All Points West, broadcast from Victoria.

It’s a collection of items of local and national interest and yesterday its host, Jo-Ann Roberts, ran an item on the recent Jammie Thomas fiasco. She interviewed Jeremy DeBeer, a well-known Canadian law professor specialising in technology and intellectual property issues at the University of Ottawa.

The RIAA is claiming a win with Jammie as the loser. But as I posted shortly before its so-called victory was announced, it’s far more likely to be pyrrhic than triumphant, reports from the ever-faithful lamescream media to the contrary notwithstanding.

I wrote:

She has 24 counts lodged against her.

But if the jury does vote in favour of Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), the news will spread like wild-fire on- and offline and hatred of the RIAA and the companies which keep it alive will mushroom exponentially, with all that implies.

Few people who are familiar with the four-year sue ‘em all war believe the labels are justified in waging it and a win for the Big 4 could easily turn Thomas into a cause - a martyr, in effect - prompting a far more intensified and widespread boycott of corporate music product than exists at the moment.

And it’s happening.

The RIAA has been wrong, wrong, wrong from the very beginning in the way it’s handling the online file sharing phenomenon. Its errors of judgment today are the same ones it was making yesterday and the day before, and that it’s been making since day one.

Only stupid people make the same mistake more than twice and continually castigating the consumers who keep its owners in business is a dumber than dumb strategic blunder.

But even worse is persistently calling mothers such as Jammie Thomas “file sharing thieves” and “criminals” and humiliating them publicly.

Talking about the case, “I bet the RIAA is going ‘Yes, Yes, Yes,’ but I’m like ‘No’!” - Terry McBride, CEO and founder of Vancouver-based Nettwerk Music, is quoted as saying in DigitalMediaWire.

“You can’t sue your fans one day and then ask them to come to a concert the next day,” he adds. “A lot of these copyright lawsuits are done in the name of the artist (by the record labels), but the artists don’t want that (kind of relationship with their fans).

His words are echoed by Jeremy DeBeer in the All Points West interview.

But before I get to that ….

Defamed and humiliated

Jammie is in the company of others such as:

• Tanya Andersen, the disabled Oregon mum who’s surviving on a medical pension, and her 10-year old daughter, Kylee
• Ray-Jae Schwartz from New York, yet another mother who this time is suffering from multiple sclerosis, the terrible central nervous system disease
• Patti Santangelo and two of her children, Michelle and Bobby, all targeted by the corporate music industry to be constantly and relentlessly defamed
• Marie Lindor, the 57-year-old New York home health aide who literally doesn’t know one end of a computer from the other
• Oklahoma’s Debbie Foster, still trying to force Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA to pay up after winning her case against their RIAA

And these are just five of the estimated 30,000 men, women and children across America attacked by the RIAA.

The RIAA has even tried to sue a dead grandmother.

p2pnet has been consistently highlighting these and other cases since the lawsuits started in 2003, but only within the last year or so has the traditional corporate news corp begun to even mention them, with America’s National Public radio among the first to attempt full and factual coverage.

The corporate print and electronic mainstream media have, though, been more than willing to faithfully and frequently reproduce highly questionable statements from the Big 4’s press units as though they’re based on accurate and reliable information from credible sources.

Jammie Thomas is being touted in the mainstream media as a major triumph for the labels. In fact it may represent their biggest publicity disaster yet.

An Ojibwe with two young sons to support, she’s accused of being guilty of of the crime of illegal file sharing.

In fact, there’s no such offence. She was found to have infringed copyrights owned by the labels, a purely civil, not criminal, matter which has been elevated by the music industry from a relatively unheard of complaint to the level of a major crime.

But the scheme to use her ordeal to drive online music lovers away from the free P2P networks and independent music sites and services into the avaricious arms of the Big 4 is already back-firing.

Instead, readers, listeners and viewers everywhere are seeing her as an innocent victim who’s being wrongly pilloried by the corporate music industry.

Winning the lottery

The impression Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG are desperately trying to convey, using the mainstream media as their mouthpieces, is they can easily and accurately zero in on individual file sharers.

In fact, the exact opposite is true. It’s virtually impossible for the RIAA to accurately identify victims and claims to the contrary are pure fabrications.

The industry uses discredited ‘investigators’ such as Media Sentry and MediaDefender to ferret out Internet Protocol links.

But IP addresses are no more than numbers which identify a given computer. They can by no means lead to the name of an individual user who’s been downloading and/or uploading copyrighted music files.

In fact, there are a number of well recognized ways in which any computer anywhere can be hijacked and used without its owner knowing.

Meanwhile, the chance of any one person appearing on an RIAA hit list is virtually the same as their winning the lottery or inheriting a million dollars.

It’s close to zero, in other words.

A little more than a year after I launched p2pnet, I ran an item on the Open Music Model by Shuman Ghosemajumder.

In it, among many other interesting things, he says:

It is clear from the upheaval in the recording industry that the traditional distribution model does not meet the needs of either the industry or its consumers. Many consumers - apparently over 60 million in the United States alone, according to some of the recording industry’s estimates - find that downloading music from free exchanges, primarily Kazaa [now itself being sued by RIAA victims], is the most convenient way to access and store music.

That was in 2003 and the mumbers of people sharing music and other files with each other has risen steadily ever since.

BigChampagne, run by Eric Garland, is the best-known and probably most reliable of the services offering data on P2P file sharing. It’s been providing p2pnet with statistics and in the US in November, 2003, on average, 2,498,431 were logged on at the same time at any given point in the day or night, it said.

By November, 2004, on average, 5,445,275 people were online at any one time. And by November 2005, the number had risen to 6,530,408.

I haven’t seen any BigChampagne figures recently, but according to Associated Press, quoting an unnamed source, “the number of households that have downloaded music with file-sharing programs has risen from 6.9 million in April 2003 to 7.8 million in March 2007, according to industry tracking”

What’s 30,000 as a statistic matched against 60 even 7.8 million?

It’s zip.

In fact, when one starts examining RIAA claims with any care, one finds most of them are either disingenuous or outright lies.

‘It’s a staggering amount of money’

Back to Jeremy DeBeer and All Points West, Jo-Ann Roberts kicks off with, “A jury found her [Thomas] guilty of quarter of a million dollars. Her crime? She was accused of sharing 24 songs online in a peer-to-peer downloading network.”

She goes on >>>

Roberts: So, $220,000 dollars: sounds like an awful lot of money. How significant you think this verdict is?

DeBeer: It’s a staggering amount of money. To start with, it’s far out of proportion of the value of the songs she shared.

The significance of the case, I think it depends on the perspective you’re looking at it from. The recording industry association use this as a great decision of precedent then it can wave around in the war on piracy. Whether or not, that will make a difference is debatable. Many experts have studied this issue and identified statistical trends indicating that peer-to-peer file sharing is on the rise but these lawsuits haven’t made a dent in peer-to-peer file sharing and they’ve only further isolated the recording industry from music fans.

Roberts: So Jammie Thomas is left facing a huge fine that she has to pay and the industry is no further ahead. This doesn’t make much sense.

DeBeer: Well, it doesn’t make much sense to a lot of people And in fact, there are groups like the Canadian Music Creators Coalition which include many of Canada’s leading artists. Barenaked Ladies and Vancouver-based Nettwerk Records and then many of their artists are advocating against litigation against consumers. They feel this is not a productive way forward.

So what we’re seeing from Canadian musicians is opposition towards the strategy of locking down content and litigating and these groups of Canadian musicians would strongly prefer to see a licensed peer-to-peer networks as a way to generate new revenue based on new business models for the industry.

Roberts: What message, though, do you think this verdict sends to people who are out there and who may be using some of these file sharing networks?

DeBeer: I don’t think it will have a significant deterrent effect, to be honest with you. I think maybe it’ll generate a couple of days’ or weeks’ worth of headlines and people will go about their business. We won’t see the tide turn in the peer-to-peer file swapping debate until the industry embraces some new business models and begins to license these networks.

Roberts: Now you said the attitude here in Canada seems to be different: what do you think the strategy of the American recording industry is in the fact that they DID take his case to court? They did not either come to an out-of-court settlement or find another route to go.

DeBeer: I’m not sure. There have been a lot of people to second-guess the recording industry association’s strategy in pursuing these lawsuits. I have my own views on whether they’ll be effective or not. I think not. I think in Canada, this isn’t the solution we should be looking at and our government policy makers should be working with musicians and consumers to find a positive solution - a way forward that doesn’t involve needless litigation.

Roberts: You mention that you’ve been looking at some of the solutions that Nettwerk Records, Barenaked Ladies, are offering. The general attitude amongst musicians in this country —- what would you say they’re telling you?

DeBeer: What I’ve been singing my research is a desire, musicians have to work with consumers, not against them. That’s not saying musicians want to give their content away for free, and it’s not saying consumers want to get it free. It’s just a matter of exploring new business models that exploit the new technologies available including peer-to-peer networks, and that allow consumers to pay free music on fair and reasonable terms yet using the software and services that they’re familiar with and that are available. So it’s just a matter of licensing the services. The recording industry can generate revenues, the musicians can earn a living, and consumers can get what they want.

Roberts: Well, it does seem that the consumer has said they’re willing to pay for this. Look at the success of iTunes. People are legitimately buying their songs.

DeBeer: The recording industry is going to argue, and they have argued, that iTunes can only be successful if there’s litigation against people who are taking music for free from peer-to-peer networks. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think we can see a thriving online music market where consumers can buy music a la cart through Apple iTunes or subscribe and get a smorgesbord from peer-to-peer networks. It’s just a matter of working together to licence these various alternatives.

Roberts: We’re seeing lots of bands who’ve put a couple of songs online that they give to you for free and if you really like it, do you tend to go out and buy the CD?

DeBeer: Absolutely. Tou can see what the band Radiohead has done recently where they’re allowing consumers to name their own price and let consumers put a value on the music and I’d be shocked if we see consumers exploit that offer, and I think what we’ll see this consumers willing to pay fair market value.

Now the Bush administration has now chimed in with its two bits.

CNET News quotes Chris Israel, US coordinator for international intellectual property enforcement, as declaring the “recording industry’s $222,000 courtroom victory shows that the legal system is working against peer-to-peer pirates,” adding:

“Cases such as this remind us strong enforcement is a significant part of the effort to eliminate piracy, and that we have an effective legal system in the U.S. that enables rights holders to protect their intellectual property.”.

Definitely stay tuned.

Jon Newton - p2pnet

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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 8:58 am and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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