p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- No trade organisation has single-handedly done as much damage to itself, the causes it espouses, and the companies it represents, than the RIAA – the Recording Industry Association of America.

The RIAA is internationally infamous. It’s fronted, essentially, by ex-politico Mitch Bainwol and lawyer Cary Sherman, both of whom have become millionaires acting on the direction of lawyers principally representing Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US), and no doubt making their own contributions toward the common corporate good.

The RIAA, formerly an innocuous organisation very few people had heard of, now represents everything unwholesome and bad about the corporate music industry, and nothing good.

It’s used the mainstream media to turn a simple commercial concept, copyright infringement, into a major crime on the level of rape and murder, made a total mockery of the US civil court system, accused thousands of completely innocent American men, women and children of being criminals and thieves, and publicised mp3 file sharing, a relatively obscure geeky phenomenon until the RIAA came along, into an activity everyone in the world has now heard of.

It’s also, incredibly, manipulated the Barack Obama administration into appointing high-level RIAA henchmen into controlling positions within the US Department of Justice.

Adolph Hitler

As reality adjustment specialists and sophists supreme, the people instructing the RIAA, and those acting on their orders, are using techniques developed by Adolph Hitler propaganda expert Joseph Goebbels to convince the world that black is white, and that corporate interests serving only a tiny handful of investors and shareholders, come before all others.

The Pirate Bay is the poster child for websites such as isoHunt, MiniNova, Demonoid, all of which offer exactly the same service as Google, et al.

Users enter a search query and get a response. Then they act on it. Or they don’t.

TPB, and the other sites, have angered Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music, and Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, by opening channels of communication and distribution they don’t, and can’t, control, and under the major movie studio and record label concept of commercial enterprise in which they dominate everything under the sun, this can’t be allowed.

So Hollywood, with the Big 4 immediately behind, is trying to sue The Pirate Bay out of existence, with similar sites lined up for similar treatment.

It’s wack-a-mole. The cartels can’t win. But it looks good in the media, significant elements of whom they control directly or indirectly and once upon a time, that was enough because there were no other universally accessible sources of information.

However, with the advent of the Net blogs, chat, IM, texting, and so on, information is now free, literally as well as metaphorically.

The corporations have used a Swedish court to present the entirely false picture that the days of TPB are over. And that message is being repeated not only in the mainstream, lamescream media, but on sites which should know better.

It is NOT over. Not by a long shot.

However, as Henry Emrich points out in a Reader’s Write, “It’s obvious that THEY can’t win, but if we’re not careful, we could win it FOR them, if that makes any sense …”

It makes perfect sense to me, Henry.

Unspinning the Spin vs Fair and Balanced

p2pnet.net went online in August, 2002, with, “frequently updated news, stories, features and commentaries on digital media, distributed computing and associated technologies and events which haven’t been spun, filtered and pre-digested by vested corporate interests”.

Over time, I’ve had comment posts and emails complaining about repetition in p2pnet because I’ve named the labels and studios behind the infamies not once or twice, but thousands of times. But I’ll keep on doing it, and I wish every web site reporting on the ‘activities’ of the corporate entertainment cartels would do the same.

However, a lot of them know on which side their bread is buttered and, supposedly in the interests of fair and balanced reporting, carry blatant corporate puff-pieces packed full with spurious and inaccurate ‘information’ and ’statistics’ as though they’re genuine news items from credible sources.

They never question. They merely regurgitate.

But things are changing.

‘The verdict achieved nothing …’

… refers to  a recent p2pnet post.

“Not in substantive terms against piracy, no,” says Henry, going on »»»

But they’re gonna milk this non-event for every dollop of publicity and misinformation.

I mean, look at the reaction on torrentfreak/zeropaid/boycott-riaa.com: huge amounts of irate ‘oh god how can this happen’ type of nonsense, conveninently ignoring the fact that as far as legally-binding decisions go, NOTHING happened, and nothing will happen until after the appeals process is finished.

That’s the problem: they’ve got a significant proportion of the p2p/copyfight/pirate ’scene’ stirred up and reacting like something happened. This is pretty much the only site where we’re halfway calm about it. Why is that?

Like I said, I may be being cynical, but I really think a significant proportion of the ‘outrage’ over this thing is manufactured by IFPI/RIAA themselves. It’s not like they’ve been doing all that well in terms of cases:

Spain just about legalized ‘non-commercial’ filesharing, so they have to do this hamfisted bullshit about trying to brand what that guy did as a ‘commercial’ activity because the site had ads. That’s a sign of pure desperation, there.

Or how bout the cammers who get a token fine, and no other repercussions? Or Stateside, the RIAA having their only ‘win’ thrown out, so they have to do it all over again?

They’re losing bad. TPB is still up, the trial was NEVER even AGAINST TPB itself, only about four guys, and would have been appealed even if TPB had ‘won’ on Friday, anyway.

So the real leverage for the RIAA is in terms of the disinformation/propaganda department.

Now what I wonder, like I said before, is how much coverage there’ll be when the case really IS decided (after the appeals):

I can tell you now, that there won’t be any street-parties, vigils, or suchlike. TPB will still be there, people will still be happily downloading away, other cases will be grinding forward in the ever-so-slow fashion we’ve come to expect, and the real verdict won’t even make the blogs.

I really hope the upsurge in Pirate-party membership translates into something substantive, but I have my doubts: the fact that somebody used the term ‘freetard’ on here, in comments which were otherwise sympathetic to our concerns is disquieting in the extreme, because it makes me think that maybe WE believe the RIAA’S propaganda line, ourselves.

Don’t worry, Henry — or anyone else. For the entertainment industry, this is a short term ‘win’.

Long term, the digital writing is on the blogs, and it won’t go away. This is the Net, not the lamescream media where stories last only as long as it takes to read them.

Online, they’re accessible for ever and with offline print and electronically media outlets closing down one after the other, it won’t be long before the old-time press machines are competing with citizen journalists and journalism in a milieu where the winners are you and I.

It may take a while, but with thousands of new surfers signing up every day,  you can be sure eventually, we’ll be reading about deals between the labels and studios and P2P innovators who are, for the moment, called criminals, and how ‘excited’ the labels and studios are about the ‘new’ developments.

Yesterday, I said »»»

In short, the defeat in Sweden isn’t a defeat.

It’s just another stage in the process.

And remember: the one statistic the ‘devastated’ labels and studio never call up when they’re claiming they’re being ruined by file sharing is the one arising because millions of people now routinely boycott corporate ‘product’.

And their numbers grow every time someone new opens an online account.

You can also bet the house that Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, and Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music know almost to the penny how much their ridiculous war against the people who keep them alive has cost, and is costing, them —- or, I should say, is costing their shareholders.

Not at all incidentally, “Haven’t Bought A CD In 10 Yrs Says,” says a Reader’s Write.

The TPB and all it represents will survive on one form or another. They know it and we know it, so don’t worry about it.

And as for the spin, more and more of it’s being unspun with every passing day.

They need us, but we don’t need them.

This isn’t a wind of change — it’s a hurricane.

And they know that too.

Definitely stay tuned.

Cheers!

Jon Newton – p2pnet

Follow me on Twitter.

April, 2009

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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