p2pnet news view | RIAA News:- Traditionally, Christmas is a time when Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG threaten the people they hope will buy ‘product’.

It didn’t happen this year because they’re taking a new approach.

Actually, it isn’t new. They’ve been trying the same thing in Europe quite some time with a remarkable lack of success.

It can be summed up like this:

“We’ve wasted hundreds of millions of dollars trying to gain control of online distribution by promoting copyright infringement, a simple commercial concept few ordinary people had ever heard of before we came along, into a ‘crime’ of monumental proportions, suing our own customers along the way.

“We and our ‘trade’ organisations such as the RIAA, BPI and IFPI are now universally hated and despised, so we’ve come up with a plan to retire into the background and get other organisations to carry the can for our actions.”

What this boils down to is: they hope ISPs will be stupid enough to persecute their own customers on behalf of the Big 4 record labels, also footing the bill.

Great idea. But it isn’t fair to expect them to do everything. So why not give them a little help, suggests free1.

“Why not use their own reporting page to tell them exactly how you feel about them?” Another good idea. And, “don’t forget to add their own URL as pirate site,” he suggests.

Click the pic on the right, or click here to complete your piracy report and meanwhile, “I just read something interesting over on another blog,” says Henry Emrich in a Reader’s Write.

BitTorrent’s Utorrent now has 28 million monthly users, he says.

You don’t say! Twenty-eight million, eh? You mean all those people are sharing stuff with each other? Looks like. But it can’t be music otherwise the Big $ would have been out of business years ago.

“Lessee here folks,” Henry says, going on: »»»

Apologists for the copyright regime like to believe that p2p is a “temporary moral lapse” (rather than a global “passive resistance through technology” aimed squarely at corporate corruption). However, I find it really difficult to believe that 28 million users are all merely suffering a “temporary moral lapse”.

And that’s just ONE application.

Copy”Right” is a faustian bargain in that the four multinational corporate “persons” comprising the RIAA dread the specter of such protective monopolies lapsing. They hate the public domain, and have done a pretty good job of brainwashing folks to believe that copyright is the real status of creations when in fact, it’s exactly the opposite: it’s COPYRIGHT which was — and remains — the “temporary moral lapse”, Life plus 70 years is only a limited time in the sense that 10 millions years is a “limited” time.

To put it bluntly, world culture will NO LONGER ALLOW it … it’s impossible for the powers that be to actually win this one on behalf of their corporate cronies.

And that’s a good thing. The fact is, in the RIAA’s business model — the Recording industry we all hear so much about these days — only a vanishingly small subset of prepackaged content will ever achieve anything remotely resembling “fame” or “success”.

The mega-star celebrity is the creation of huge corporations which, up until relatively recently, controlled EVERY meaningful distribution-channel. Newspapers, television and radio, record stores — all of it firmly within their grasp. Thus, they were able to create or suppress whatever “trends” they wanted, and become amazingly wealthy and politically-connected as a result.

Nowadays, a few things have changed:

1. Milli Vanilli demonstrated conclusively that the ‘major’ labels don’t help talent or groom art, so much as MANUFACTURE it. The mere fact of having pawned Rob and Fab off on the buying public as artists constituted a giant Fuck You to the very buying public they depend on for their wealth. One of those no-talent cretins is dead now, and from what I can piece together, the other’s been vainly trying to resurrect the tattered scraps of his former stardom to no avail.

2. Jack(off) Valenti’s froth-dribbling idiocy comparing the VCR to the Boston Strangler proved once and for all that the RIAA actively HATE innovation — unless they can manage to control such innovations so as to corner the market. Back then, VCRs were seen as a dire threat to their “business model” and — like any good “capitalist” in our glorious “Free Enterprise” system — they sought to have them banned.

NOW, VCRs and DVD players are the center pieces of a “vital revenue stream”.
In short, the RIAA are lying vermin, and we shouldn’t believe anything they say.

3. The Internet — single best communications channel in history — represents an even greater revolution than the printing-press, in that it’s now possible for virtually anybody to disseminate “content” at negligible cost, planet-wide.

Further, digital formats demonstrate that the (overpriced) plastic discs the major labels want us to buy are nothing more than a delivery system for what we REALLY want — the audio/visual content.

Further, the fact that the SAME COMPANIES who are suing their own customers make a hell of a lot of money from selling us the blank discs, CD burner drives and ripping programs indicates — let’s be charitable here — something of a mixed message.

If Sony and the other RIAA member corporations hate the idea of the Great Unwashed Masses having the ability to rip mix and burn, then they should stop selling us the technological means to do so.

But there’s the rub. Thanks to the (ostensibly) capitalist system upon which they depend and from which they gain their wealth and power, they CAN’T AFFORD TO DO SO. If Sony didn’t sell us DVD burners, somebody else would.

(That’s why that idiot Valenti did what any good little capitalist does when confronted with competition: went squealing to the government like the evil little pig he was.)

They managed to break the DVD by mandating region coding, and their dedicated teams of code-monkeys are doubtless hard at work trying to figure out how to break the next generation of content delivery system in hopes that we all turn into vegetative little “consumers” once more.

It ain’t gonna happen.

Vista’s “unbreakable” bullshit was cracked in, what, a month?

The Megacorps are in a bind: how do they train and recruit the next generation of R&D Drones while keeping the rest of the populace ignorant and passive in regard to the technology which surrounds us all?

They had to exempt so-called “professional” audio gear from various DMCA provisions for a reason, people: like the guilds of old, THEY want to believe they can control the world (or at least their particular niche).

They also need to keep up the fiction that they give a shit about creativity or art — that signing with them is all that different from becoming a Wal-Mart greeter. They can’t afford to inconvenience the people who REALLY MAKE music or movies too severely, or those who REALLY CREATE AND INNOVATE will start pressuring lawmakers to change things, and/or SIMPLY SHOVE ODIOUS LAWS OUT OF THE WAY.

They know it’s logistically impossible to prosecute millions of people scattered planet-wide. They ALSO know that people are waking up to the REAL nature, purpose, and harmfulness of current IP “law”.

Patents and copyright are under increasing scrutiny. Corporate “person-hood” — especially in light of recent events — is set to become the hot button issue of the next few years.

Put bluntly, the jig is up.

They know they’re lying, WE know they’re lying, and — importantly — we’re not backing down.

That’s my Christmas wish, folks — that we — ALL of the millions of people all across the globe — continue to make life hell for the RIAA and any other corporate lobbybots who can’t learn their place.

All the best for the New Year, Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG.

---

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 9:48 am and is filed under RIAA News. 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.

HOME

Viewed 3672 times