RIAA ‘tough love’ statement #2
p2pnet news | RIAA News:- RIAA mouthpiece Jonathan Lamy is parroting one of the more pharisaical statements made by his boss, Cary Sherman.
“As any fan of ‘The Sopranos’ knows, the mob often takes out its enemies in a gruesome fashion as a way to warn others to fall in line,” says MarketWatch’s Therese Poletti in a story picked up by Ray Beckerman’s Recording Industry vs The People.
She goes on >>>
The same can be said of the campaign over the past four years instigated by the dreaded Recording Industry Association of America, more commonly known as the RIAA, which has been on a mission to stop or slow down the practice of illegal music downloading online.
Their special target, as most people know, has been college students, with some seeing their very education come under threat for what used to be a time-honored tradition – copying their friends’ music.
That copying, of course, has taken on a much larger scale with the Internet, which allows students to share songs and albums by the thousands – often without paying a dime.
“This is a form of tough love,” said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the RIAA …”
Lamy is referring to the extortion letters being delivered to students by university staffs. But his hypocritical comment is in no way his own.
“If you’re among the millions of people wondering why Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG are suing their own customers through their RIAA, wonder no more,” p2pnet posted last year, going on:
“It’s ‘tough love’ says Cary Sherman, the RIAA’s most experienced dissembler who’s said on numerous occasions the members of the Big 4 are losing ‘billions’ of dollars to people who share copyrighted music with each other online.
“Because sharing is exactly the same as thieving, n’est-ce pas?”
“It’s tough love,” Sherman went on because, “for the first time, despite years of educational efforts and the availability of plentiful legal alternatives, we are holding people personally and financially accountable for the theft of creative works.”
In this latest iteration, “Much like the New York mob family in ‘The Sopranos,’ the RIAA is trying to send a blunt message,” says Poletti, adding:
“It isn’t right to jeopardize someone’s education. Granted, some wealthier students just show the letter to their parents, who quickly pay to make the case quietly go away. The RIAA should just charge students double the rate of a song on iTunes (99 cents) for every song they are found downloading.
“But Lamy said settlements need to be of ‘consequence’ to deter the activity in the first place.”
Marketwatch adds the EFF’s (Electronic Frontier Foundation) Fred von Lohmann and the EFF, “have long been arguing that the RIAA campaign is unwise and unfair.
“The music industry is using scare tactics to bilk millions of dollars from college students who can ill afford it as a stop-gap measure while it tries to figure out a business model as it goes through its biggest seismic shift ever.”
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Also See:
MarketWatch – RIAA tactics to combat piracy again in question, March 20, 2008
p2pnet – RIAA lawsuits are ‘tough love’, October 18, 2007
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March 21st, 2008 at 7:21 am
So sharing is thieving. Why? Because you’re depriving them of sales. Even if that were true, it couldn’t be twisted to that definition, or one could claim that a rival competitor is thieving because their business deprives another of sales.
Also it is not depriving them of sales when the sharer would never have bought the media, even if not obtained freely.
So their holdfast propaganda is a bag full of holes.