New York AG Andrew Cuomo: RIAA coordinator
p2pnet news view P2P | Politics:-| RIAA News:- 2008 is almost over and in what has to be the biggest-ever of Big 4 music label PR scams, eclipsing even their sue ‘em all marketing campaign, they say they’ll stop suing their own customers.
Enlisting the major on- and offline print and electronic media as unpaid PR pumps, with Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal as the principal mouthpiece and New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo as coordinator, Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music(US) are now touting ISPs as corporate copyright cops.
In the WSJ, they say their Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) will, “try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers”.
The newspaper doesn’t say if the RIAA is paying Cuomo for his services, or if New York taxpayers are subsidising him on behalf of the Big $ labels.
If the former, surely that’s a serious breach of New York laws, and if the latter, shouldn’t Cuomo resign on the grounds he can’t possibly represent the people who elected him when he’s also acting in vested corporate interests?
The WSJ story goes on »»»
The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider’s customers making music available online for others to take,
Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.
The RIAA said it has agreements in principle with some ISPs, but declined to say which ones. But ISPs, which are increasingly cutting content deals of their own with entertainment companies, may have more incentive to work with the music labels now than in previous years.
The new approach dispenses with one of the most contentious parts of the lawsuit strategy, which involved filing lawsuits requiring ISPs to disclose the identities of file sharers. Under the new strategy, the RIAA would forward its emails to the ISPs without demanding to know the customers’ identity.
Though the industry group is reserving the right to sue people who are particularly heavy file sharers, or who ignore repeated warnings, it expects its lawsuits to decline to a trickle. The group stopped filing mass lawsuits early this fall.
As Recording industry vs The People and Wired reported, the statement above is an outright lie and in fact, the RIAA has been as busy as ever, clogging up American legal systems with spurious sue ‘em all cases.
As for Cuomo, he, “began brokering an agreement between the recording industry and the ISPs that would address both sides’ piracy concerns,” says the Wall Street Journal, quoting Steven Cohen, Cuomo’s chief of staff, as saying, “We wanted to end the litigation. It’s not helpful.”
And, “As the RIAA worked to cut deals with individual ISPs, Mr. Cuomo’s office started working on a broader plan under which major ISPs would agree to work to prevent illegal file-sharing,” it says.
How may people in Cuomo’s office were involved? And at what cost in salaries and delays to other non-corporate NY projects?
“The RIAA says piracy would have been even worse without the lawsuits,” says the story, adding:
“Citing data from consulting firm NPD Group Inc., the industry says the percentage of Internet users who download music over the Internet has remained fairly constant, hovering around 19% over the past few years. However, the volume of music files shared over the Internet has grown steadily.”
‘I’m not sure I entirely see the story …’
The NPD is no more a credible source of data or ‘facts’ than is the RIAA.
Said p2pnet a week ago »»»
`Legal` downloads are growing faster than `piracy,` claims the NPD Group.
According to a story in Silicon Alley Insider »»»
The recession is not driving music lovers to piracy. Just away from their CD players.
The volume of legal music downloaded in Q3 increased 29% over the same period a year ago. That beats the growth in illegal music downloads over peer-to-peer networks, which rose 23% y/y.
Overall demand for music declined 2% in the third quarter, research group NPD reports.
But, I`m not sure I entirely see the story here, Eric Garland, CEO of media measurement company BigChampagne.
In fact, The rate of growth paid downloads is down dramatically from previous years, as one would expect, he tells p2pnet, Because the rate of growth is not really an instructive measure here.
He goes on »»»
When paid downloads increase from ten songs sold to fifty, that`s a 500% increase, but only 40 songs sold. Yet an increase from selling ten million songs to fifteen million songs is only a 50% increase â but five MILLION in new sales.
Put another way, it is the volume of activity that makes for a real comparison, and in our estimation the volume of P2P music downloads exceeds the paid downloads more than ten to one.
On the other hand, though, NPD`s assessment of the growth rate in P2P far outpaces our own. We do not observe a 23% increase in P2P music downloads y-o-y. On the contrary, while there is significant growth in film, TV and elsewhere, music is relatively flat.
Note the the growth rate of iTunes et al has slowed considerably and is expected to continue to do so.
International Flavors & Fragrance and Wrigley
Five letters sum up the NPD`s entertainment cartel component:
D – O – D – G – Y
And yet it`s utterances are routinely parroted by on- and offline media as though they`re produced by a reliable source.
It once said iTunes was outdoing LimeWire, and that was back when LimeWire was a major factor in the online music scene and Apple`s iPod user-funded front-end wasn`t even a blip.
Says the WSJ Law Blog, “We like to think that, more than PR problems, the RIAA changed course because of a recent decision by a federal judge in Minnesota,” citing the Jammie Thomas case as the probable reason.
The RIAA fell flat on its face with the only file sharing case it ever managed to bring before a civil judge and jury.
Thomas, a single mother, was hit with a $222,000 verdict for allegedly offering to share copyrighted Big $ music files online via the seriously discredited Kazaa P2P file sharing application.
“At trial, Judge Michael Davis told the jury that merely making songs available for distribution — known in copyright circles as the ‘making available’ standard — was enough to constitute a copyright violation,” says the Law Blog, adding:
“In other words, the record companies didn’t have to prove actual distribution took place. But then, in September, Judge Davis not only decided his instructions were wrong, but he also implored Congress to change copyright laws to prevent excessive awards against individuals in similar cases.”
Oops.
Meanwhile, the supposed deal with the ISPs notwithstanding, RIAA says it’ll still sue people such as Joel Tennenbaum, a PhD student represented by Harvard professor Charles Nesson and some of his students, if and when it feels like it.
Meanwhile, among many questions which still go begging, one stands out:
Will the new US president, Barack Obama, follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, George W. Bush, by continuing to not only allow, but support, the efforts of mainly foreign conglomerates to sue innocent American people, including children, in the name of the bottom line?
Stay tuned.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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December 24th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
This is interesting, because it looks “threatening”, but probably won’t actually DO much (other than piss a lot more people off, and waste huge amounts of bureaucratic effort.)
As usual.
1. The RIAA lobbybots already have this type of “send them a note, and ask them to stop”, in the form of DMCA takedown notices. The thing that nobody bothers to understand about the dmca is that it has completely and utterly failed to DO anything against “copyright infringement” because the vast majoirity simply find nothing wrong in “infringing” a century-long monopoly power wielded primarily by corporate megaliths who — in the vast majority of cases — had absolutely nothing to do with the “creations” they now monopolize.
People realize (especially after the Sonny Bono copyright extension act), that — barring the lobbyists’ actions, the vast majority of copyrighted work SHOULD be in the public domain by now. They also realize that patent and copyright are NOT “fundamental human rights”. They’re compromises struck between lawmakers and special interests (NOT “creators” by any stretch of the imagination.) Nobody feels particularly “guilty” about getting something that SHOULD have been freed up years ago.
Especially not after having seen how the corporate lobbyibots — when confronted with the specter of their copyright monopolies ending, simply go and “buy” themselves another twenty years.
The RIAA is — despite their confident pose — frantically backpedalling at this point: they’ve alienated their two key demographics (teenagers and music fans), shown themselves to be outright OPPOSED to any genuine “innovation” they can’t hamstring (region coding for DVDs, the VCR as “boston Strangler” etc, ad infinitum). Nobody’s buying it, any more than Australian ISPs actually believe that State-coerced censorship/filtering can actually work.
This whole premise rests on the fallacy that connectivity is static. True, many broadband users DO have an “always on” connection (cable modems or dsl), but with the growth of WIFI and other technologies, “networking” has become progressively more ad-hoc, and I’m not just talking about “wardriving” either.
This shit fails utterly the first time somebody suspends a bittorent download, goes to a friend’s house, and reconnects using his wireless network (or maybe Starbuck’s free wifi hotspots, etc.)
Not to mention the fact that people can buy 8 gig USB memory sticks for, what, twenty bucks?
The REAL solution to the collosal non-”problem” of file-sharing is twofold:
1. Limit the terms of copyright monopolies to the original 14 years, with NO RENEWALS.
And,
2. Explicitly prevent the awarding of “excessive” damages even DURING the 14 year monopoly period. Make the maximum possible award the price of the “content” itself.
Patents and copyright are SUPPOSED TO EXPIRE.
Maybe it’s high time they all “expire” entirely….)
January 24th, 2009 at 9:25 am
The effectiveness of the RIAA can be greatly hampered if the principals are restricted in their breathing privileges or have them revoked!