Stomp file sharers: MPAA, RIAA
p2pnet.net News: – The entertainment industry – Hollywood, for short – is calling for the US Supreme Court to overturn the Grokster / Morpheus ruling that says p2p networks aren’t liable for alleged copyright violations committed by users.
Big Music wants it coming, and it wants it going. It’s already suing file sharers, including children, and it also wants to sue the people who make and sell the software the music industry’s ex-customers use.
But, “traffic on file-trading networks has continued to climb even as record labels have sued more than 5,000 users for copyright infringement,” says Reuters.
Actually, it’s closer to 6,000 and if you count in the people Big Music is trying to nail in Europe, its 6,159.
“Dozens of entertainment-industry companies asked the court to reverse an appeals court decision that has prevented them from shutting down networks like Grokster and Morpheus that they say encourage millions of consumers to copy music and movies for free rather than buying them,” says Reuters.
“We believe that the liability, the secondary liability that these companies have avoided by building their companies in such a way to get around the law, is something that needs to be thought about and revised,” an MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) spokesperson is quoted as saying in an IDG News Service story. In lock-step with the MPAA is the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).
Both enforcement units are owned by the entertaiment industry and act as its public faces.
To the industry’s way of thinking, customers – mums and dads, kids still in grade school, senior citizens – are potential hard-core criminals who have to be beaten into submission by lawsuits.
However, they’re your next-door neighbours, not calculating organized criminals.
They’ve stolen nothing. Nor are they making huge profits by re-selling millions of Big Music copyrighted tracks.
And yet they’re being excoriated as villains responsible for huge sales losses and enormous business down-turns.
In reality, the effect of file sharing is tiny.
“Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed to displace a single album sale,” say Felix Oberholzer (Harvard Business School) and Koleman Strumpf (UNC Chapel Hill) in their empirical analysis, The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales.
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See:-
including children – Sue kids in UK piracy suits?, p2pnet, October 10, 2004
infringement – Hollywood Asks Top U.S. Court to Weigh File Trading, Reuters, October 8, 2004
closer to 6,000 – Big Music vs You, p2pnet, October 8, 2004
the law – MPAA Revives P-to-P Lawsuit, PC World, October 11, 2004
October 12th, 2004 at 5:21 pm
Update: http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4545656,00.html
The Supreme Court on Tuesday sidestepped a dispute over whether Internet providers can be forced to identify subscribers illegally swapping music and movies online.
It looks like the Supreme Court has better things to do than be the industry’s police enforcer.
ln_solitude
October 12th, 2004 at 7:15 pm
What I find remarkable is the way that the RIAA/MPAA ignores reality, reality that could benefit their members.
When P2P file-sharing was at its peak, music SALES were at their peak. When they shut down Napster, and started suing people, sales declined. The geniuses making decisions at RIAA seem to think that MORE lawsuits and less sharing will increase sales, even though the evidence is the opposite.
I don’ swap files for the simple reason that I prefer better sound quality than can be had with computer formats. That said, the internet allows me to sample artists that I either forgot or never heard. Sometimes, that leads to a sale.
If you combine the two ideas presented above, you understand why record companies give their music to radio stations. If a lot of people hear it, somebody might buy it. Years ago, that was the cause of “payola”; when the record companies understood how important “getting it heard” was. They were so eager to get it played on the radio that they were handing out cocaine, cash, cars, anything that would do the job.
Honestly, if a record company wants to increase sales, the single best way to do it would be to post their entire catalog for free, online download, recorded at something like 96kbps. If you like it enough to want to listen to it more than a few times, you’ll want a better quality recording, and you’ll go buy it.
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All of the above ignores the question of whether intellectual property laws make any economic sense. I make my living by selling copyrighted material that I create. That said, I’d be perfectly happy if the copyright/patent laws were repealed. Statist proponents argue that the ability to patent it gives you an incentive to create/invent it. As a creator/inventor, I would argue that the laws give you an incentive to stop creating/inventing until the patent expires!
I have the physical patents (leather books with lead seals) that my great-grandfather filed over one hundred years ago. While he did file them, the reality was that he was successful because he stayed ahead of his competitors. If he had relied on the patent protection, his competitors would have beaten him in the market place. By the time they figured out how to do what he patented, he had already introduced the next version (steam valves, the nineteenth century equivalent of tubes/transistors).
The biggest irony of all is that a major reason that this country was successful economically was the ability to copy (steal?) the plans for British textile weaving machines. Samuel Slater worked in a cotton-spinning factory in England, and understood the design well enough to reproduce it in the US (illegal at the time). The same was true of Francis Cabot Lowell (and others) with respect to textile weaving. Most remember Whitney and the “Cotton gin” from history classes, but few public school teachers in the US will discuss the issue of whether it was an invention or copy.
Thomas Jefferson & Benjamin Franklin were perhaps the two smartest Founding Fathers. Both have long lists of inventions. Both OPPOSED “the awarding of limited monopolies to inventors”. As the centuries have gone by, the United States has ignored more and more of their advice, and now more closely resembles the England that they fled than the country that they created.
October 13th, 2004 at 3:15 am
excellent comment.
The USA was built upon ideals such as individual freedom, small government, and free trade. Two and a quarter centuries later it is rapidly turning into the exact opposite. Big government continues to grow, as does the horde of lobbyists for ’special interests’ – the modern-day version of the King’s court.