It’s You or Us, RIAA says
p2pnet.net News:- On behalf of the Big Four record label cartel members – Warner (US), Sony-BMG (Germany and Japan), UMG (France) and EMI (UK) – RIAA boss Mitch Bainwol has declared Open Season on file sharing and file sharers.
In a statement he says:
- It’s legitimate versus illegitimate.
- It’s iTunes, Rhapsody, the new Napster and Wal-Mart, Amazon, Musicnet, Dell, Sony Connect, Microsoft and others versus the likes of Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster.
- It’s whether or not digital music will be enjoyed in a fashion that supports the creative process or one that robs it of its future.
- That’s the online future of music.
Translated, that means:
- It’s the legitimate desires of innovators and music lovers against the untrammeled greed of the entertainment industry
- iTunes, etc, are going nowhere. WE’VE GOTTA DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT !
- Let’s hope and pray that INDUCE gets through. Otherwise we’ll be up Excreta Creek
- What do we do now?
In the meanwhile:
- p2p is here to say.
- People are fully entitled to make back-ups of discs for which they’ve paid good money by whatever means they choose – whether the entertainment industry likes it or not.
- Music lovers are no longer controlled by the moods and fancies of the Big Four record label cartel members.
- p2p is the future: its potential as a sales, marketing and distribution vehicle is mind-boggling.
This is the Digital Age and the labels and movie studios will adapt or die.
August 25th, 2004 at 10:36 pm
Hear, hear.
I wonder if Wells Fargo had had the wherewithal (and if the politicians of the day had had the same lack of ethics and foresight) to thwart the spread of automobiles in the early 20th century whether we’d all be riding in stagecoaches even to this day.
Or even had there been a powerful and wealthy bank tellers’ union, would we still be lining up with Mary Lou to access our bank accounts every Friday afternoon?
Where is the “inventor of the internet” to help the cause of technological advance NOW?
August 25th, 2004 at 11:38 pm
Right on. Well said.
August 26th, 2004 at 4:25 pm
I wonder what Sir Time Berners-Lee thinks of all this online stuff going on.
August 26th, 2004 at 4:55 pm
You know, if they used filesharing to their advantage, instead of trying to destroy it, they could make a lot of money. There are about 60 million alleged filesharers the RIAA wants to sue. If 10 million of them (that’s about 1 in 30 Americans) agreed to pay a small flat monthly fee of $10 that would guarantee them protection from the RIAA while allowing them to download an unlimited supply of all the free songs they wanted, the music industry would receive a total revenue of $100 million after one month, which is more than the iTunes music store made in a whole year. If p2p didn’t exist, and people were forced to pay ridiculous prices for music, they wouoldn’t buy the amount of music they currently download for free, because they just don’t have that kind of money. But if music were in limitless supply for a flat fee, they’d gladly participate. It’s like Columbia house from 10 years ago. Nobody cared what CD’s they might receive in the mail, they just ordered random music on a fluke, because it was a good deal (at the beginning)
August 27th, 2004 at 4:00 am
It’s you or us Riaa says Well then riaa I say its YOU or would that be US oh hell Filesharers WIN !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
August 27th, 2004 at 11:34 pm
what’s interesting is that Mitch and his cohorts are the ones who drew the line in the sand. uncomprimising attitudes always leads to conflicts.
August 28th, 2004 at 2:28 am
Bainwol did not draw anything anywhere. He is a paid mouth who says what he is told to say.
August 29th, 2004 at 2:03 pm
I really don’t think most people would pay $10 per month for the piss-poor quality of music you download for free.
You can get better quality by recording to cassette from the radio, oftentimes.
Maybe for $10 per year, you could get a large amount to subscribe. But unless you are giving most people CD quality tracks, forget it. This is just the same as sharing Albums/CD’s/Tapes that has happened in the past under fair use.
Today, they need to give up the ghost of living off the avails of musicians. Middlemen are going to die out, and actually have to do some real work for a change.
The industry is changing; just as anyone can now be a half-assed sound engineer with digital equipment, so can anyone rip audio tracks from their friends CD’s and make copies.
They need to realize their days are numbered, and no amount of lawsuits will ever destroy it, just as the betamax didn’t die (it merely became the industry standard, with VHS supplanting the home standard), neither will digital audio go away from suing a bunch of individuals.
August 30th, 2004 at 2:36 am
Damn – Would the writer of that please run for President of the US? You’ve got my vote!
As for one of the replies to this story that nobody would pay $10 a month for downloading legit services…. I have the answer that nobody either wants to hear or wants to think about on the isp side because it would add more work for them.
Any isp could do this and settle 100% of the problems:
If you transfer more than 2gb down or up in a month you pay an extra $1
If you transfer more than 10gb down or up in a month you pay an extra $5
and an extra $1 per 2gb there after.
Ok, yes, it would cost us more but #1 it solves the question of IF the artists get paid or not because the isp could take (and it would have to be required by law that 100% of the money NOT go to the isp) the money and drop it into a single fund – that fund would go 33% to the software companies, 33% to the Movie industry and 33% to the music industry. Ok I’ll be fair, 5 cents out of every dollar would goto the isp’s for processing fees.
They would LIKELY make more money that way than any other concept I’ve heard to date. Yes it would be ugly but what choice would the end users have but to pay unless they canceled their broadband lines? This would cost people like me alot being that I download the latest linux iso’s when they come out, to add to my LEGAL Direct Connect share, but I dont really care – at the point the isp’s start collecting for it, THEN we could download and share whatever we wanted and it would be legal, everyone would be happy, and the story would be closed and THEN THE GOVT COULD MOVE ON TO REAL IMPORTANT PROBLEMS and less on these stupid issues that a GOVT should never have to think about…
Just my 15 cents.
_-Jile-_
August 30th, 2004 at 9:09 pm
And just how do you divide the proceeds between artists? Think before you write next time.
August 31st, 2004 at 7:34 am
you tell them dude you tell them!!!