p2pnet news special feature: - My friend Bill Evans (right) started Boycott-RIAA.com, selling it to keep it online when he ran out of resources. We both worked for the new owner for a while, leaving when neither of us could live with the new management’s approach.

Bill, who among many other things exposed the infamous RIAA video scam, has gone to new horizons. But when he ran Boycott-RIAA site, he also started a Rogues Gallery to “highlight certain people who have a negative affect on online music”.

The gallery hasn’t been kept up, so I’m reviving it in his memory as a work-in-progress.

I’ll add to it over time and I’d appreciate it if anyone has any pictures or interesting information on any or all of the inmates would pass it along to me here - p2pnet @ shaw dot ca.

I’m kicking off with people, past and present, fronting for the world’s most hated record labels —- Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG.

The RIAA

The Big 4’s RIAA is probably the best-known of the many and various Big 4 alphabet organisations such as the CRIA, ARIA, BPI, IFPI, etc, and so on. It was founded in 1952, “primarily to administer the RIAA equalization curve, a technical standard of frequency response applied to vinyl records during manufacturing and playback,” says the Wikipedia.

RIAA is short for Recording Industry Association of America but only Warner can be said to be American, and even it’s run by Edgar Bronfman jr, a Canadian.

Vivendi Universal is French, Sony BMG is Japanese and German, EMI is British and in the digital 21st century, the RIAA’s principal mission is to use the corporate lamescream print and electronic media and American legal system to try to terrorise existing and former customers into buying overpriced, low quality Big 4 cookie-cutter ‘product,’ using P2P and file sharing as the hook on which to hang their specious claims that files shared equal sales lost.

Understandably, they’ve never come anywhere near being able to demonstrate, let alone prove, this assertion and Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf, “seriously upset the the Big 4 Organized Music cartel anti-p2p propaganda applecart when they released The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis.

In it, they concluded, “Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates,” and their research has been echoing loudly ever since.

The RIAA also claims to act for contracted musicians.

But as Bill once put it, “A musician without the RIAA is like a fish without a bicycle.”

Sue ‘em all !

“What is the RIAA’s end game?” - Bob Lefsetz once asked.

What indeed?

He went on, “To eliminate all file-trading. To control online distribution. To sell secure downloads at a reasonable price. Secure as in you can only make limited copies, if any at all. Maybe you can burn a file to a CD. Lose that CD, you’re shit out of luck.”

For p2pnet Rogues Gallery purposes, the RIAA story begins in in 2003 when, on behalf of its masters, the RIAA, launched the bizarre sue ‘em all marketing campaign.

Running it was Hilary Rosen, a staunch believer in protecting children from obscene lyrics and who, it’s thought by many, did a lot more than merely stir the pot when the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) was being cooked up.

She’d had previous experience at this sort of thing, having had a hand in helping to draft Iraq’s copyright legislation.

Deeply in the background was another ex-RIAA boss, Jay Berman, who’d left to take over the Big 4’s IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry), and Cary Sherman (right) who, to all intents and purposes, now runs the RIAA, with Mitch Bainwol as the titular head.

Berman left the the IFPI to found Berman Rosen Global Strategies with Rosen, who abandoned the RIAA to Bainwol’s tender mercies.

When she departed in the summer of 2003, was she pushed or did she walk away under her own steam?

Good question.

Meanwhile, Bainwol, former chief of staff to then senate majority leader Bill Frist, was hot to trot and, “Mitch’s strong background and experience will be a real asset to the RIAA,” Sherman is quoted as saying.

“We welcome him to the RIAA and look forward to working with him on the important issues facing our industry at this crucial time.”

Sherman wasn’t interested in the Boss job. And why should he have wanted it? As RIAA president and principal sophist, he’s paid more anyway.

“What could be more rewarding than helping to promote two great American traditions: music and property rights?” - wondered Bainwol (right).

But, “Music is not Mitch Bainwol’s passion,” and, “he’s never used a file-sharing service like Napster or Kazaa,” it was reported when he took took over the RIAA control deck .

“NCAA college basketball is where this Georgetown graduate’s extracurricular interests lie.”

Leading EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) lawyer Fred von Lohmann said at the time Bainwol was a, “new name to him, and that he didn’t think of Bainwol’s former Senate boss, Frist, as a ‘major copyright player‘.”

But, von Lohmann agreed, “having a connection to that level of power on the Hill is useful to the recording industry”.

TO BE CONTINUED ……

Jon Newton - p2pnet

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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