p2pnet.net News:- The members of the Big Four record label cartel have succeeded in characterizing 6,952 very ordinary Americans - many of them students and children - as hardened thieves and criminals.

Their victims stand accused of robbing the beleagured music industry and its financially hard-pressed contracted artists and support staff of what’s rightfully theirs.

Their crime? Sharing digital music files where the copyright is owned by the cartel.

But of course, the labels aren’t beleagured. Nor are their artists or support staff hard pressed beyond difficulties caused by their employers’ miscalculated approaches to doing business in the digital 21st century.

The record cartel and movies studios are in the same boat. They’re claiming MPEG compression technologies are allowing people to make easy-to-download copies of their product, in the process depriving them of billions of dollars in revenues.

Were it not for these compressed music and movie files, these same people would otherwise be spending money on product instead of sharing it online for free, claim the movie studios and CD makers.

Hi-Fi versus Low-Fi
MPEG is a kind of compression technology used to shrink video and audio files, and mp3 means MPEG layer 3 audio.

When you listen to a CD, you’re hearing a high quality, faithful reproduction of the original music. But a CD is huge, and nearly impossible to handle online by normal means, although that’s changing. An mp3, on the other hand, has been compressed and in the process, data, such as frequencies we don’t really detect, disappear.

Obviously, the more ‘compression’ there is, the greater the diminution in quality. Consequently, an mp3 is an inferior and ‘lossy’ version of the original. However, by virtue of the fact it’s been nipped and tucked - compressed - it’s now ’small’ enough to be easily handled online.

An mp3 is fine for use on a portable mp3 player with headphones, or over computer speakers, but it’s not much good for high quality, high fidelity systems such as home stereos.

And yet the music iundustry claims that every time someone downloads an mp3, it’s being deprived of one or more CD / DVD sales. Or that it’s losing a dollar, the normal corporate music rip-off for an mp3 download on one of the Big Music-backed and -supplied music sites, such as Apple’s iTunes.

If people weren’t sharing music on the p2p networks, goes the corporate thinking, they’d be buying music industry mp3 ‘product’.

How a lossy mp3 track download equals a lost CD sale has never explained. And although by seriously stretching reality, it may just be possible to argue that a single high fidelity CD track might be worth 30 or 40 cents, say, there’s no way on earth an mp3 is worth more than a few pennies.

What applies to a music mp3 also applies to a compressed movie file of the type found on the p2p networks where, claims the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), file sharers are robbing the major movie studios of billions of dollars by sharing compressed movies online.

However, where a music file has a certain amount of quality, the same can’t be said for a p2p movie.

The seven big studios deliberately give the impression that faithful reproductions of their feature films are being shared over the p2p networks.

That’s complete nonsense.

Shared movies tend to be in one of two categories:

1 - Larger movies - say 600mb or 700mb - with reasonable quality, but often with sound or pixelation explosion problems where suddenly, part of the picture is lost to panels of colour, or the sound is poor or not synched. If a watcher saw something like this on a tape or DVD rental, he/she would demand a refund

2 - Small files sometimes split in two or three sections, each of around 120-200mb. When they’re played back, the colour quality is terrible and there’s little or no contrast, they’re jerky because frames have been lost as part of the compression process, they’re often marred by pixel explosions which mean total image losses for seconds at a time, and so on.

On top of that, it can take literally hours - and sometimes days - to download a movie. How many people will bother?

And yet, the studios claim these downloads are costing them huge revenue losses.

What’s actually happening, however, is this:

Where before mpeg, people had to rely on trailers and critics to give them an idea of whether or not a movie was worth paying good money to see, or a record was worth buying, now people can, and do, sample entertainment industry wares in depth and in detail before buying.

Mpegs represent a kind of 21st century quality control and they mean the entertainment industry can no longer get away with passing off low quality, over-priced product with impunity.

File sharing and file sharers aren’t responsible: poor product quality and the fact the entertainment industry continues to use 1970s business models in a 21st century, digital media setting.

Nor are file sharers crooks.

The real criminals are making a fortune through fake and counterfeit product. But they’d be largely out of business without the physical product the labels, studios and software makers continue to churn out in the billions for the hard-core organized criminals to dupe and copy.

So wouldn’t the labels and studios be far better off using digital technologies and p2p networks to store, promote and sell their already digitized outpourings? They’d reduce overhead, slash physical production, and packaging, and all kinds of other costs.

They spend a vast ocean of money on ‘enforcement’ efforts. That expense would be cut dramatically.

But there’s a problem.

Without CDs, DVDs and associated equipment such as burners, players, blanks, recording equipment, camcorders and all the other gear associated with, and linked to, the production of film and music product on both sides of all fences, Sony, for one - which also makes and sells a substantial part of the aforementioned equipment while bemoaning file sharing - would be in dire straits.

Shot down in flames
In the meanwhile, the labels, and now the studios, continue to terrorize people with the threat of legal proceedings with humongous financial penalties.

But not one of the thousands of suits launched by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has ever been heard in open court.

This means a judgement as to whether or not file sharing is indeed illegal has yet to be reached and the concept of innocent until proven guilty, goes by the board.

By default, and by dint of the non-stop PR, file sharing is assumed to be illegal, a farce which goes unquestioned by the mainstream media

Gaining control of p2p and the p2p networks is essential for the entertainment industry’s expansion plans in this 21st century.

With p2p file sharing as the driving pretense, the studios and labels have a staggering number of acts going through the US congress.

They know not every single bill will be passed, but they’re counting on volume to ensure that a enough will get through to give them total, and literal, control of what people see, hear and do in their own living rooms

The entertainment industry is spending billions of dollars promoting self-serving technologies such as broadcast flag, through which the industry aims to ensure that their product - and only their product - is available to ‘consumers’.

It’s an unfortunate reality that in the US, the dollar reigns supreme. But to quote Bill Thompson, “Although this is currently a US copyright battle, the results will affect everyone. European legislation like the EU Copyright Directive is often directly modelled on US law, in this case the Digital Millennium Copyright Act …”

And what about the p2p networks? All we hear about is music and movies. But p2p file sharing means far more than that.

To quote Thompson again, “A peer-to-peer network can be used to share family photos, free software, licensed music and any other sort of digital content. The mere fact that it could in principle be used to exchange dodgy copies of a Britney song is therefore irrelevant.”

And back to the ‘criminals’ - the men, women and children being terrorised by the multi-billion-dollar industry and its bought-and-paid for political supporters around the world:

“I’ve never had a situation like this before, where there are powerful plaintiffs and powerful lawyers on one side and then a whole slew of ordinary folks on the other side,” said US district judge Nancy Gertner at a recent hearing in Boston.

===================

One of the most recent RIAA victims is Brett Bojrab, who , “owns hundreds of compact discs that he listens to while driving,” says the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, going on:

“To supplement his collection, Bojrab admits he’s downloaded about a hundred songs from the Internet. And though he didn’t know it at the time, the 37-year-old Fort Wayne man also made his music collection available for others to review and copy. Now, Bojrab is faced with a federal lawsuit filed against him by some of the largest recording companies in America.”

Bojrab was willing to destroy the computer files and a few custom CDs he’d made for himself, “but he was flabbergasted when an attorney representing the recording companies also asked for $4,500,” says the Journal Gazette.

And that’s how Big Music gets away with it.

It knows full well none of its victims can even begin to contemplated taking on it and its legions of highly paid, expert lawyers.

So it makes the oridinary people it’s terrorizing with threats of court an offer they can’t refuse. To paraphrase Marlon Brando in the Godfather: ‘Pay us and we’ll go away.’

The victims always pay, as they do in the Godfather. In so doing, they add to the idea that they’re guilty of something, but they have no other recourse.

“Bojrab, who plans to speak with an attorney this week, says he wants to fight the lawsuit because he contends what he did wasn’t any different than taping a television show and watching it later. But he doesn’t know if legal costs will outweigh the principle of winning.”

Some of the other Victims
Bojrab is just one the 6,952 Americans lined up to bolster the entertainment industry’s plan to force people to use its product - or else.

The MPAA has now joined the party, but the RIAA started it all. And one of its first victims was a 12-year-old girl, Briana LaHara, forced to pay Big Music $2,000 - or end up in court, a prospect her mother couldn’t even begin to contemplate.

Briana had believed that by spending $29.99 on Sharman Networks’ Kazaa, she was entitled download songs.

“If I knew the rest of my life wouldn’t be ruined and that I wouldn’t have this huge financial thing hanging over my head, I’d stand up to them,” Lorraine Sullivan, another early victim, told p2pnet. “But I can’t take the risk.”

Sullivan was a college student in New York, up against the RIAA and its paymasters, the international record industry, because she was among the 261 people named in the RIAA’s first wave of civil sue ‘em all prosecutions.

Under US copyright law, she faced penalties of up to $150,000 per song. That’s why, as she told us, she decided to settle.

Ernest Brenot
Retiree Ernest Brenot of Ridgefield, Washington, said in a handwritten note to a federal judge that he didn’t own a computer and didn’t know how to use one.

“There’s a mistake in this case,” Brenot’s wife Dorothy, said. “We’re innocent in all of this, but I don’t know how we’re going to prove it.”

Brenot was accused of illegally offering 774 songs for download.

His son-in-law had briefly added a Net service to hisx cable tv account while he was living with them because Comcast Cable Communications Inc said it would cost extra to send separate bills to the same mailing address.

Sarah Ward
A 65-year-old grandmother, Mrs Ward was sued by Big Music for supposedly sharing copyrighted music using Kazaa.

The trouble was - she owns only a Macintosh computer which can’t run the troubled Sharmen Networks p2p application.

Ross Plank
Plank was accused by the record labels’ RIAA of making hundreds of Latin songs available on Kazaa. But he didn’t even have the p2p app on his computer.

Tami Lafky
Tami Lafky is a single mother and someone else who doesn’t even know how to use the computer that’s in her home. But an RIAA attorney contacted her and told her that although she could owe the Big Five record labels more than half a million dollars, they’d settle for $4,000.

Here’s one on thep2pweblog and cut and pasted from an AIM log in June this year.
The person I’m speaking to went to my High School and has been an E3R reader for quite some time. His name has been changed to conceal his identity.
me: D, i heard what happened dude. RIAA sucks.
D: yes they do
me: 3000$ out of court?
D: yeah i’m just waiting to hear more at this point
D: more or less, but about that
me: how many mp3s did you have?
D: they’ve a list of 6 differernt songs uploaded from my dorm
me: so for 6 songs they’re making you pay 3000$
D: for a while i was thinking it was my roommate not me since he dl’s more than i do, then i saw the list and i really don’t think my roommate would have cure or smiths on his comp
D: basically
D: if i went to court they could charge me over $100000 per song if they wanted to
D: which is why i’m settling
me: jesus
me: what P2P program were you running?
D: kazaa
D: the shadiest of the shady

Charli Johnson
This August, when Charli Johnson opened her mailbox July 2 and found a letter from a California law firm she thought it brought good news.

“But it’s not a joke,” she said later.

The letter told her to accept RIAA’s settlement offer or be sued for $750 per song - or, $444,000.

The Apple iTunes / Pepsi / RIAA disgrace
Surf the Net on your favourite search engines and you’ll find all kinds of stories about RIAA victims of the RIAA’s sue ‘em all campaign.

And one of the worst, and most deviant, examples of what can happen came during the Super Bowl this year when Apple Computer teamed up with the Pepsi company and the RIAA to exploit a small group of teenagers who’d already been pilloried by the RIAA, and compelled to pay the RIAA’s owners, EMI, UMG, Warner and Sony-BMG, very large sums of money they couldn’t afford.

They were sensationalised and criminalised in a bizarre ad campaign created to boost iTunes sales via free Pepsi drinks.

But like all the other victims, these kids are ordinary people, not criminals to be used to promote ‘product’.

No one being sued has stolen anything or used the music they’ve shared to enrich themselves in any way.

In the meanwhile, the real criminals, the organized international counterfeiters, dance circles around the entertainment industry, laughing loudly as they go.

Jon Newton

This entry was posted on Monday, November 22nd, 2004 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.

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