Time for Big Music to wake up
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- Unsurprisingly, there’s been considerable fuss over the online publication of a slideshow purporting to outline a licensing proposal from the Warner Music Group to American universities whose students (as well as men and women and even young children across the nation) are currently the victims of a concentrated, carefully organised, attack by the RIAA.
Having completely missed the boat when, early in this new century, it became blindingly obvious P2P and file sharing are here to stay, Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US) launched a bizarre sue ‘em all marketing campaign under which they use their ‘trade’ associations to use law courts around the world to try to terrify online music lovers into becoming compliant consumers of corporate ‘product,’ just as they are offline; and, to gain exclusive control of the Net as a distribution vehicle.
They’ve never come even close to succeeding in either goal and in the meanwhile, they’ve made the lives of thousands of completely innocent people thoroughly miserable.
In a Reader’s Write to the Warner Music university music plan rebuttal, “It’s about time they reconsidered the ‘litigation based approach’,” says Henry Ermich, going on, “it hasn’t worked, and — at most — can only target a vanishingly-small number of people who, thanks to the fluidity if IP addresses, etc, implicit in how the Net works — may not even be the ones they want.”
He continues »»»
Moreover, as we need to keep hammering every chance we get, Copyright as it now exists serves NOT as an ‘incentive to create’, but as a passive income-stream in perpetuity for already wealthy corporate megaliths. Not to mention the fact that when threatened with the expiration of one of ‘their ‘copyrights, they’ll just buy themselves another extension in the same way that the Sonny Bono bullshit happened. Everyone knows this, which is why a sizable proportion of the world’s population doesn’t see anything wrong with file-sharing or p2p apps.
So the corporate shmucks know that the ‘litigation based approach’ (suing their best customers) won’t work, and has so far only succeeded in alienating their key demographics — teenagers and music-fans. They know this can’t work, and they also know that all of their attempts to strengthen IP ‘protection’ have pretty much failed as well. Booby-trapping their own product (a la Sony) failed, and pissed a whole lot of people off to boot.
So, just behind all their obfuscatory bloviating, we all know what’s really going on: they know full well that they’ll HAVE TO do some kind of ‘constructive solution’ like blanket licensing or drastic copyright reform of some kind, simply to save face and attempt to stay relevant.
You know you’re adversary’s pretty much beaten when they start taking about ‘pursuing constructive solutions’. Did they talk about ‘constructive resolution’ with Napster? No. Did they talk about a ‘constructive resolution’ when they destroyed mp3.com? No.
Now, after years of (failed) jackbooting and against ever-improving forms of p2p technology, when an entire generation of people has already grown up in a world where file-sharing is a commonplace and they’re recognized for the corporate lobbyists they are, and treated accordingly — NOW is the point where their carefully-maintained facade slips.
Those four words: ‘pursuing a constructive solution’ — amount to the RIAA member-companies acknowledging they’ve already lost, and are fully aware of that fact.
“I’ll gladly stay tuned,” Ermich adds, “just to watch them crumble.”
Did you enjoy this story, or find it interesting/useful? Help keep the posts coming by donating. No amount is too small. Cheers! And thanks.
licensing proposal – Warner Music unveils university master plan, December 5, 2008
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It`s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
December 8th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Shut! Don’t wake them up!
They are puting themselves out of business.
This is what we want. Is’nt it?