Big Music university scams
p2pnet.net News:- The entertainment cartels have been going flat out using their sue ‘em all campaigns to intimidate schools across America into following Penn State’s lead.
It was the first senior US teaching institution to allow itself to become a music industry sales unit with teachers and administrators acting as unpaid sales, promotion and enforcement staff.
It goes like this: the Big Four record labels make a major PR production out of suing students for sharing music, going on to offer shabby, over-priced industry ‘product’ through hackneyed download ’services,’ supplied and supported by them, as the only alternative.
As a Reuters/Billboard story stresses:
“In April, the problem led the Recording Industry Assn. of America to target more than 400 college students at 18 universities with file-trading lawsuits and issue notices of copyright infringement to 140 college administrators”.
The labels then purport to ‘educate’ students with spurious Intellectual Property Law programs based on materials and concepts supplied by the industry, and bolstered by industry flacks.
However, there’s excellent news.
Given the headlines that inevitably follow the insertion of each hard-core commercial sales and marketing program into a university, one could be forgiven for thinking the cartels had succeeded in penetrating every campus in the country.
But that’s not the case.
In fact, mainstream media and record label hype notwithstanding, fewer than 100 of America’s 3,300 colleges have actually allowed themselves to be scammed.
“Yet the big question is whether the availability of these legal alternatives will stem the traffic on illegal peer-to-peer services,” says the Reuters/Billboard piece.
Cdigix is about to try to pump Big Four record label trash into into the entire University of California School System.
“If you‘re looking at this in the macro picture, there are two points to be addressed,” Cdigix‘s Goldberg is quoted as saying.
“Is this reducing the amount of P2P illegal traffic on campus, and are the students that are leaving campus becoming users of the paid-for services once they‘ve graduated?”
This is a more ‘adult’ version of other entertainment and software cartel schemes to hook them while they’re young and gullible, and to make sure they stay hooked after they leave school.
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See:-
Reuters/Billboard – Universities enroll in music services, August 1, 2005
record label trash – California sucked in by Cdigix, p2pnet, July 18, 2005
‘adult’ version – Anti-p2p propaganda in schools, p2pnet, May 24, 2005
