P2P Minnows and RIAA Sharks
p2pnet news view P2P | RIAA News:- “All we want are the facts” is a catch-line made famous by TV cop Joe Friday in the Dragnet series.
At the start of 2009, that’s all we want – and we want them from Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US) and their RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).
But the chances of getting them are about as real as the chances of the Big 4 suddenly waking up to smell the roses.
There is one indisputable fact, though:
The mass sue ‘em all campaign, run by Mitch and Cary and the other spinsters over at the RIAA, isn’t being halted because the executives who run the Big 4 have finally come to their senses, realising suing music lovers isn’t the best way to win customers and generate good will.
They don’t give a damn about that. They believe they’re big enough and powerful enough and well established enough to do whatever they want.
They’re sharks swimming in a vast sea and nibbles here and there from (what they see as) minnows in the shallows won’t make a lasting impression, they reckon: not when they believe they own the entire ocean.
It’s hogwash
Their RIAA is, “set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy,” says the Wall Street Journal, going on, “The decision represents an abrupt shift of strategy for the industry, which has opened legal proceedings against about 35,000 people since 2003.”
“Critics” say the, “legal offensive ultimately did little to stem the tide of illegally downloaded music,” says the story, “And it created a public-relations disaster for the industry, whose lawsuits targeted, among others, several single mothers, a dead person and a 13-year-old girl.
“Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. 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.”
But it’s all just so much rhubarb. What it really means is: the labels have achieved their primary goals of creating a climate of fear which, for people sucked in by their Goebbelogue, means buying their ‘product,’ and only their ‘product’ because it seems to be the only safe way to go without being sued.
They’ve succeeded in turning an innocuous and purely commercial matter, copyright infringement, into an international crime, warranting the attention of governments and police forces around the world.
They’ve undermined the authority of universities across America, turning them into marketing and enforcement divisions, and staffs into music industry cops, paid for out of school fees and state and federal funds.
And now, having firmly established copyright infringement and file sharing as major crimes in the eyes of significant portions of the public at large and lamescream media, it’s time to create a frightening new spectre — ISPs as RIAA-controlled barracudas.
And while the pundits and media argue about whether this latest act of misdirection is for real (which if course it isn’t), Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG are consolidating, slowly and surreptitiously gaining control of how and by whom ‘product’ is distributed online as they strike deals with music ’services’ run by entities they’ve designated as safe and secure conduits between them and the music buying public.
But in 2009, things won’t be so easy.
What have they achieved so far? Nothing.
The P2P Minnows have evolved into a vibrant new species which fully understands the ocean is everyone’s, not the exclusive property of the Big Music Sharks which are, after all, no more than the last surviving remnants of a breed which to all intents and purposes became extinct when the first file was shared.
All we want are the facts
The Big $ claim as facts that »»»
- Files shared equal sales lost
- They’re being “devastated” by file sharing and file sharers
- There’s no difference between sharing music online and walking into a store and stealing a CD off the shelf.
- Suing their own customers is really for their benefit: it’s just ‘tough love’.
We’re now into year six of their attacks against their own customers who, they allege, share music with each other, robbing the honest and hard-working corporate music industry of their rightful dues.
Paul Rapp is a lawyer practicing in New York and Massachusetts. At one point in his career, he was acting for at least 20 people who’d been hit with RIAA subpoenas, and had, “consulted on the phone with dozens more,” said John E. Mitchell in a North Adams Transcript post that’s no longer online.
Rapp is also is a musician who found file-trading works for him and his band, said Mitchell, going on »»»
Rapp first began to look into file sharing in 2000, when he downloaded Napster and typed in his band’s name to see what the big deal was, sarcastically interested to see how much the band might be losing through downloading.
“As the search thing was flashing, all of a sudden I got this chill of ‘What am I going to be if we’re not on there? How much would that suck?’” said Rapp. “It came up and there were half a dozen files of ‘I Wanna Be a Lifeguard’ up there to be traded and I was relieved. Here’s a song that’s 20 years old and it’s still got viability, people are still listening to it, and that’s when I realized the real beauty of the file-sharing services.”
Rapp said many musicians on his level and above feel the same way about file sharing, especially since recording contracts often penalize the musicians monetarily for not being platinum sellers.
To musicians in this situation, whatever theoretical “lost sale” they might have for any given download is far outweighed by the positive publicity they received from still having their work out there, which translates into sales and concert attendance.
And »»»
Rapp and other people involved in file-sharing cases say the RIAA’s tactics are plainly bullying, but that this makes sense when you consider that the purpose of the lawsuits has nothing to do with compensation for copyrighted music.
“The industry isn’t suing you for damages, that’s not what they’re doing here,” said Rapp.
“They’re suing you so that they can issue a press release that they’re suing you. It is simply playing to the cheap seats and it has nothing to do with actual damages, it’s all about public relations and trying to change the behavior of – the last I heard – something like 50 million people.”
In other words, the music industry slaps 2,000 people with easily settled lawsuits in order to spread fear among consumers. Consider that their target lawsuit also is their target sales audience: College kids.
“Whenever they do a wave of 750 lawsuits at 20 colleges across the country,” said Rapp, “they very methodically issue press releases that are dutifully picked up by the wire services about the RIAA’s targeting 750 and they always call them ‘thieves.’ It’s less about litigation and more about public relations, to be sure.”
Demonizing your target audience is few businesspeople’s idea of sound publicity, yet the music industry bandies around the term “piracy” in their press releases despite the fact that downloaders aren’t attempting to sell anything for an illegal profit.
In this climate, “pirate” might as well be slang for “music enthusiast” – file sharing is a similar phenomenon to the age-old record collector practice of trading sides and making mix tapes. Rapp thinks that treating the audience this way is encouraging those who might not be downloading under other circumstances to do just that.
“I think it has alienated a large part of the new generation of music lovers and I think it’s radicalized a lot of kids,” said Rapp. “In many ways, it may seem trite, but this is this generation’s Vietnam. Iraq should be this generation’s Vietnam, but I think free music, at least in terms of emotion and commitment and politicizing kids, may be it.”
Inexorably slipping away
As the Big $ sun sinks slowly in the west, the labels are watching their hitherto unassailable positions as Masters of the Music Universe inexorably disintegrating. But instead of admitting they made a Big Mistake, rectifying it by enlisting the people upon whom they depend as their collaborators and partners, declaring them to be honest and decent instead of accusing them of being criminals and thieves, they’re hell-bent on driving them even further away.
At the close of the first decade of the 21st century, the RIAA has fired MediaSentry, its grossly inefficient private eye which provided the evidence used by the RIAA to pillory thousands of men, women and children.
The Big 4 extortion unit also says it’s going to stop suing people.
But we know that isn’t true. In fact, the Wall Street Journal story which follows up p2pnet’s report that the Big 4 extortion unit has dispensed with MediaSentry’s ’services,’ says it, “still plans to closely monitor people it believes are illegally uploading copyrighted music, and continue with the legal action it already has in progress. It says it will still file lawsuits for exceptional cases.”
In other words, their latest scheme is just more BS from the masters of BS, and it’ll have only one goal – to force the embryo internet music business into a prison with the Big 4, and only the Big 4, as the wardens.
To succeed, they have to gain complete and exclusive control of every aspect of online music delivery, including how people everywhere find ‘product,’ just as they do offline, and they’ll stop at absolutely nothing to achieve that.
And while Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG and their various trade organs such as the RIAA, MPAA, IFPI, BPI, CRIA, and so on, try desperately to stay afloat in a digital world they can’t fathom and will never understand, below are several items which really are facts »»»
- Sharing does not equal stealing. It never has done and never will do. With P2P file sharing, not one person or entity has been temporarily or permanently deprived of anything.
- It has never, ever, been proved that file sharing has resulted in the loss of even a single sale.
- With file sharing, no money changes hands, no profits are made or lost and no one is injured, financially or otherwise.
- File sharing has had no demonstrably negative effect on corporate music industry profits. To the contrary, it’s a priceless, and free, viral marketing tool.
- Only a tiny fraction of the 60,000,000 or so American who, according to elderly stats, have used P2P file sharing applications online have ever heard from the RIAA.
- According to a 2007 IDC white paper, The Expanding Digital Universe, More than one billion songs a day are shared online as mp3s.
- Studies such as one from the IPI (Institute for Policy Innovation) which purport to demonstrate that file sharing has a negative effect on music industry sales are worthless.
- Marketing reports such as those from the NPD Group which purport to show ‘legal’ downloads are making significant inroads into ‘illegal’ ones have little bearing on reality.
- Downloading the equivalent of approximately one CD increases [our emphasis] purchasing by about half of a CD,” says The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing: Abstract, from Industry Canada. Or as Globe and Mail columnist Jack Kapica said of the study, “Its conclusion: P2P file-sharing does not put downward pressure on purchasing music, as the music industry has insisted for years. In fact, it does just the opposite: It tends to increase music purchasing.”
- More than 60 million Americans above the age of 12, “have downloaded music (Ipsos-Reid, 2002b),”says The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales An Empirical Analysis, going on, “a majority of Americans under eighteen have downloaded and half of those are heavy users [...] Among U.S. adults at least eighteen years old, the number of downloaders has about doubled since 2000 (Pew Internet Project, 2000 and 2003). Because physical distance is largely irrelevant in file sharing, individuals from virtually every country in the world participate.” And yet, “Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically ndistinguishable from zero …”
- “According to an internal study done by one of the majors, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the drop in sales in America had nothing to do with internet piracy,” said Britain’s The Economist.
- Does file sharing reduce music sales? A case of Japan says there’s, “not sufficient evidence that file sharing systems are responsible for the recent decline in CD sales”. Rather, “p2p usage helps in the promotion of music by allowing users to experience it before purchase; and, p2p usage helps in the discovery of new music by users.”
Quality counts!
“Downloading a few MP3s off the internet does not make me less inclined to purchase music,” wrote Sarah Perez in 2004, shortly after the RIAA started claiming the reverse.
It does, “just the opposite,” she said, going on »»»
Have you actually listened to a CD of your stolen/shared MP3s? The quality sucks! Sometimes it is so bad, that it actually reminds me of tapes. You know…cassette tapes? (For those of you Gen-Y or younger: tapes are these rectangular plastic things that we used to use for listening to music before there were CDs but after there were records.) And tapes suck. Remember that time when your cassette deck finally ate your favorite “radio mix”…the tape coming out, unspooling as you try to remove it from your boom box; you – desparately attempting to rewind the tape back onto the spools with your pinky, but secretly knowing in your heart of hearts that it was over?
Ah yes, tapes. I don’t miss them at all. And for all the convenience (and price!) of getting something for nothing through your trusty Gnutella client, I say you still get what you pay for when it comes to file-sharing. For example, I just burned a whole CD of Blink 182 songs. Songs I got via “sharing.” And now I am practically salivating to have the actual album.
Whether you download and pay for a song or walk into a store and purchase the CD itself, what you are getting is quality. And while quality may not matter so much as you rock out to Smashing Pumpkins while sitting at your desk checking your email, it sure does matter as you fly down I-75 at 80 MPH on the last leg of a 10-hour road trip or the first leg of your morning commute. Quality matters! Not with everyone, every band, every time. But when you really really really like the music, you go the extra mile to own a good copy of it.
And feel free to share that copy with 1000 of your closest friends!
Most online music lovers tap the free P2P networks or independent music sites, leaving the Big 4-supported commercial sites to people with more money than sense, and meanwhile:
File sharing is our radio; that’s the way people hear our stuff ~ Guy Picciotto
Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing ~ Alexander Solzehnitsyn
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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January 5th, 2009 at 11:07 am
loved the post Jon, absolutely summed up 6 years of draconian tyranny in one neat package.
January 5th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Well said, not that anybody wil pay any attention.