P2P = people to people
p2pnet news view | P2P:- Will 2008 be the year the pigeons come home to roost for Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, the members of the Big 4 organised music cartel?
An important, completely unsung (by the mainstream media) factor in the steady decline in corporate CD sales is the huge, and still growing, groundswell of consumer anger.
People just don’t understand why the Big 4 should with impunity be able to sue them, their mothers, their brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles, their grandparents , their friends, and so on, and still expect them to blow their hard earned dollars on overpriced Big 4 product.
But the labels only think they’re getting away with it.
Pressured by public outrage, the corporate press is slowly being forced to do more more than merely regurgitate self-serving entertainment cartel press releases and statistics as though they come from credible sources.
Some mainstream journals, not a few of them utterly contemptuous of citizen reporters, are starting to at least partially cover the other side of the coin, the one representing us —- the people who keep all of them going, as they seem to forget.
“One of the most important, but as yet largely unrecognized, Big Music stories to break this year centres on a small university legal clinic in Maine,” p2pnet posted after Christmas, going on:
“And, it’s about to cause a revolution in the P2P filesharing war launched by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, p2pnet posted just before Christmas, going on:
“In what’s probably a world’s first, not lawyers, but student attorneys at the University of Maine School of Law`s Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic have themselves taken up the fight on behalf of fellow students.
“Hannah Ames and Lisa Chmelecki from the Cumberland clinic are now officially representing two Maine students. Ames and Chmelecki are being guided by clinic director and U of M associate professor Deirdre Smith.”
We also said, “If other student from clinics not only in the US but around the world follow the examples of Ames and Chmelecki, the stage will be set for a series of confrontations and lightning strikes even the highly paid expert Big 4 legal teams won’t be able to handle.”
The mainstreamn press haven’t had time to put a story together? Sure they have.
But when we did maine + riaa Yahoo and Google searches in traditional press news areas, we came up completely empty.
The only Google hits were for p2pnet, Wired News, TECH.BLORGE and Slashdot posts. Yahoo produced only Slashdot links.
But when we did the same as general searches, we stopped counting after we’d reached 30 different posts not merely from the US, where events are unfolding, but from around the world. And there were a lot more.
The breaking University-of-Maine/student-lawyer story is news by any standard and although there’s as yet zero mainstream reporting on it, there’s a plethora of online coverage.
In other words, the people who need to know about this DO know, and not only in the US.
This wouldn’t, and couldn’t, have happened decade ago. But thanks to blogs, web pages, IM, chat, and so on, we consumers, as we’re contemptuously called, no longer have to rely on the corporate press for our news and information.
At last, the public consciousness has a public voice, and a loud one.
We look to each other, and that means no delays, no self-serving statements from the corporations we fund, no unctuous and patently insincere statements from the MPs we elected but who spend most of their time sucking up to Big Business.
Says iZealot in a comment post to the Wired Listening Post story:
The RIAA suing students is like God suing Johannes Gutenberg for inventing the printing press and duplicating Bibles. Or suing those monks who copied Bibles by hand. The internet is allowing our civilization to approach something like a collective consciousness, all ideas are now accessible to anyone who cares to collect them. If someone doesn’t want their ideas shared, they should probably not insert it into the collective consciousness. Keep it to themselves. If, however, a person thinks that his or her idea is worth sharing (perhaps for the betterment of mankind) then by all means, share it, just don’t be surprised when others agree that it’s a great idea and decide to share it further.
Like the RIAA, the Romans tried to censor the free sharing of ideas with their “Hey, don’t listen to that guy Jesus, don’t spread God’s word,” but did the Christians listen? Hell no. They illegally made copies of Jesus’s words and shared his ideas with many people.
P2P = people to people.
So stay tuned 
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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December 31st, 2007 at 7:33 pm
“the huge, and still growing, groundswell of consumer anger”
You can say that!
They need us we don’t need them!
They need us we don’t need them!
They need us we don’t need them!
December 31st, 2007 at 7:38 pm
The corporate press is becomming irrelevant because they are just corporate, reporting only the corporate views and nothing else.
People want real information not just corporate noises.
June 20th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Sweet, people are actually reading what I randomly post on the interweb! Nice. But seriously, the RIAA is horrible and needs to be stopped. Good to see other people putting up a fight for P2P and the progress acheived through the mutual sharing of ideas.