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CEO of RIAA Speaks at P2P Conference

Posted by chrisd on from the the-mouthpiece-pulls-a-mundie dept.

Sarcasmo writes: "Hillary Rosen, CEO of the RIAA ? , spoke at length (PDF of Speech) yesterday, during the 'O'Reilly Peer to Peer and Web Services conference'. " Update: 11/08 02:15 GMT by H : Yeah, I removed the Rosen text. Sorry.

24 of 550 comments (clear)

  1. Really good point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    She makes a good point that artists should be able to make money off of their work.

    Too bad the record companies screw them every which way from Thursday.

    1. Re:Really good point by evilWurst · · Score: 5, Insightful

      nobody put a gun to the artists' heads and made them sign a deal with any particular record company, yet they have absolutely no say in the matter when it comes to people downloading their stuff for free

      Who ever said they have any say about signing the contract? If you'd ever paid any attention to the issue, you'd know that all publishers are members of the music industry cartel, which consipires to 1) keep the contracts all the same, so no one publisher can steal artists by offering a sweeter deal than the others, and 2) keep album prices the same, so no publisher can steal customers by offering a sweeter deal than the others. Of course, because of this they can also make the 'one contract' really shaft the artists, and the 'one album price' also shaft their customers.

      In other words, there is no choice for the artists who aren't already rich, and no choice for the fans who aren't already rich. This is fundamental cause of the whole mess. Blaming mp3s does nothing. Even if the entire Internet and every desktop computer vanished, CDs would still cost too much and artists would still be getting shafted.

    2. Re:Really good point by Shagg · · Score: 5, Insightful
      The RIAA is a monopoly. Please name a commercially successful band that was not under contract with them. They have the ability to tell bands to either sign a contract with them and make didley squat, or go out on your own and just make squat.


      They own all the copyrights, control all the content, and are the only distrubition point. The artists have no choice, and neither do the customers.

      --
      Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
    3. Re:Really good point by elmegil · · Score: 5, Insightful
      I'm a musician too. Whoopty doo.

      There are two types of songs I download from the net: things I can't fscking get any other way, and things I want to hear before I buy them. If I don't like them, I may not delete them from my disk, but I don't listen to them either. No loss to the artist. If I DO like them, I'll go buy the album.

      If I had to make such a choice without hearing the music, I wouldn't buy it at all. I've been burned way too damn many times buying albums with only one decent track (can you say White Town boys & girls?) to do otherwise.

      As for the things I can't get any other way...if the RIAA would make their entire catalogs available for a reasonable fee (we're not talking the $1+ per song that it costs to get a physical album these days) for download, I would be straight legit for every single track I have. But of course they aren't really interested in that, they want to resell and resell and resell only the most lucrative portions of their catalogs rather than actually disseminate music to the people who want to hear it.

      --
      7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
    4. Re:Really good point by Art+Tatum · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I agree that there are bad elements on both sides. However, I must point out that viewing copyright and patent as property rights is wrong. The Constitution (and other writings of the authors of that document) make it plain that copyright and patent are MONOPOLY rights. They enable a publisher to have a short term monopoly (14 years, originally) for the purpose of recouping publishing costs. It has zilch to do with property.

    5. Re:Really good point by linuxpng · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm sure I'll get modded down, but oh well. Why is it all of a sudden our job to renegotiate musicians contracts? It seems to me that this civil disobedience is only defiance of authority. I'm going to have to say that these people are all adults (mostly) or have adults representing them. I can't feel sorry for these guys. I know it sounds preachy but everyone misses opportunities to make more money, you do the best you can and move on. As for the RIAA, I don't condone anyone who sells and markets a product pissing on it's buyers. It's a tough place to be, I mean you like a band and want to support them but at the same time you don't want to support the RIAA. I think the best thing overall to do is not to give any of those people money. If you want information/music to be free the RIAA has to lose money and go out of business. Only way to do that is to stop giving it to them. The real musicians who love it will forge on.

    6. Re:Really good point by einTier · · Score: 3, Insightful
      A bigger problem is that they want to control, control, control.


      They want to force you to keep buying the same album. First it was oooh, look, vinyl! Then it was, if you buy a 8-track, you can play it in your car! The 8-tracks broke too much, so here's a cassette. Cassettes wear out, here's a CD. Unfortunately, CD was almost the perfect medium. They've not been able to get people to switch over to DAT or MiniDisk or DVD-Audio. And, barring some fundamental switch in technology, they won't be able to.


      Enter electronic music. People want to download digital bits of music to their portable players -- but the RIAA hasn't figured out a way to get them to pay for it. Preferably, pay for it for each player, and pay for it each time it's played.


      But, they aren't looking at what people want and are willing to pay. I'd pay $5 for a CD, and I'd think it was fair for something that costs less to make than a cassette that costs an exhorbitantly high $8-10. As it is, I buy no CDs. I'd buy a track online in mp3 format for about $0.25. I'd buy just about everything I want if they were about $0.05. Again, I think this is a fair price for something that costs very little to distribute. I won't pay $1.00 for a track that is in a propriatary, protected format, and I won't pay $0.25 or even $0.05 for a song I can only listen to once or twice.


      I'm extremely distressed at the back catalogs I can't buy -- even if I want to, and the music they won't sell me at any price, and don't want me to get, like b-sides on CD Singles released only in Germany. I'm even more distressed by the insane profits the music industry makes, and the way they keep trying to squeeze yet more profit out of the consumers.

      --
      -------------------------------------------------- $665.95 -- retail price of the beast.
    7. Re:Really good point by ksheff · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's why one reason why Branson and casinos exist. To give old once popular musicians jobs. They probably make a hell of a lot more money doing that than what they get for royalty payments. They probably make more playing bingo than what they get from the RIAA/record labels/whatever.

      Besides, who says that once someone becomes popular and then fades from the public spotlight that they must depend on those royalties forever? Unless they were the song writer and someone covered their work, after they stop being popular, what little they were getting before drops substantially. They will get other jobs. Big deal.

      The hypocritical part of all this is that the music industry & the RIAA routinely screw the artists over by classifying the recordings as a 'work for hire' product (see the earlier Slashdot article about it). If the product is not the artists', why not pay them and everyone else involved a set fee. This would certainly eliminate a big reason for all the tracking and radio station payment crap. Unless my employer has a profit sharing or stock compensation plan, what payback do I get if I write something that makes them a lot of money? Nothing. I get paid to do a job. Why can't these people? If the copyright laws would have stayed the same as they were when the country was founded, none of this would be that big of a deal. However as it stands now, copyrights are being used as a way to try to get on an eternal gravy train. Write a hit song or something else and then milk it for decades as opposed to the original plan: do something creative, get paid for a short amount of time, then it's free. Since the time one could get paid for it was short, if one wanted to do this for a living, the creativity would have to be sustained. Scale the copyright laws back to their original state and pay supporting people wages. None of the p2p stuff would matter then.

      Also, she kept referring to all of this as theft of intellectual property. None of this is theft of IP. That would imply that I would take a song and then try to pass it off as my own and deny the creator the appropriate recognition they deserve for it. They aren't losing any IP (well the record companys anyway..the artists do with work for hire contracts). They are just aren't making the obscene profits that they want to make.

      --
      the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
  2. Hmm. . . by jiheison · · Score: 5, Insightful

    She states that lesser selling but still popular artists have a hard time finding their fans in efficient ways, and fans have needed more direct access to their favorite artists and easy access to ever part of their creative output.

    As far as I can tell, the RIAA is the primary obstacle to both of these goals.

  3. If they'd produce good content... by Bad+Dude · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If the music industry would focus on producing an entire cd's worth of good music, I'd be much happier to buy it. In these days of image before talent, it's easy to see why the public doesn't feel like spending money on a portion of a cd that they will enjoy rather than a rich listening experience that they'd call 'a good cd all in all'....

  4. Intellectual Property as America's Core Export by theblackdeer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Dear Ms. Rosen,

    You make a good point regarding the differences in businesses, whether they play by the rules (major labels), or break them (Napster). Napster-like trading services have changed the way your business competes, and it is an unfortunate truth that your business will have to change in order to deal with that. I don't see how asking consumers to 'step up to the plate', or to 'cough up some money on that plate' are going to help your business be competitive.

    Best Regards,

    R. Hogaboom

  5. Jackster and the Beanstalk by Bonker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But as long as you?re looking for whom piracy really hurts, ask the guitarist
    in the coffee shop, or the group scratching out a living touring in a beat-up van.

    Oh bullshit.

    It's precisley these people that the wantonly open trading of music helps most.

    I saw an interview with the Offspring a little bit ago. They were asked the question 'How can my garage band make it big'.

    They gave several suggestions, but the one they harped on most was giving away the music to anyone who would listen to it, be it kids, dj's, or record executives. I think they were talking about free tapes and CD's, but it amounts to the same thing.

    Look at Rammstein (sp?) with their hit 'Du Hast'. Rammstein would never have been as big in NA with a German-titled song without the power of MP3 piracy. Nobody knew who they were in the U.S. before their tracks started showing up on Scour, Napster, and Usenet.

    Hillary Rosen is a lying bitch. She's not worried one little bit about money, for herself or for the artists. She's worried about the music industry losing control of their golden goose, which has already happened to a great degree.

    Jack Jackster into the castle, has the singing harp and the golden goose, and now the evil giant Hillary has to keep him from getting out alive. Here's hoping she falls off the beanstalk and makes a big hole in the ground when she lands.

    --
    The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
  6. Ok... by Danse · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ok, is it better if I screw some little old lady out of her pension by promising her a great return and getting her to sign over her money to me and then pointing out some bit of fine print that allows me to keep all of it, or if I just steal it all out from under her mattress? Which one makes me an asshole? More specifically does one make me a bigger asshole than the other? This also leaves out the part where record sales were climbing greatly during the P2P peak. Maybe those downloading were still buying?

    --
    It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
    1. Re:Ok... by Danse · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Maybe the economy was awesome and people had more $$$ to spend on music?


      Maybe. But how do you know? They claim Napster would destroy artists because they couldn't make a profit, yet even at Napster's peak, they were raking in record-breaking profits. I think the evidence supports my argument more than theirs. They have yet to show any real damage resulting from file-swapping. That's kind of like accusing someone of murder when everyone can plainly see that the "victim" is alive and well, and just bought a new BMW.


      The rest of this post is off-topic. Ignore it if you like.


      Damn...this is like the studies that say "concealed carry laws correspond with periods of decreased crime!"


      Completely off-topic, but since you mentioned it.... Concealed carry laws don't correspond so much with "periods of decreased crime" as they do with decreased crime in the town/city/state where concealed carry is legal. Obviously other factors must be taken into account as well, but so far, the evidence is on the side of concealed-carry advocates. From what I've read, it's usually a case of the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to opponents of concealed carry. The papers I've read opposing cc take even less into account than the papers in favor of cc. (Btw, I'm not, nor have I ever been, a gun owner. I have read quite a bit about the issue though.)

      --
      It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
  7. So what are you saying? by yoz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That they're not valuable? Apparently it's just because you don't like them.

    Okay, let's have a couple of very basic lessons which most of the "Of COURSE I should be given it for free, DUH!" bozos around here seem to need.

    1: Does recording a new Britney Spears (or another artist you may actually like) album cost money? You betcha. Recording time, session musicians, studio staff, blah blah blah, not to mention all the promotion for the album, design costs, etc. It all adds up to thousands or even hundreds of thousands in many cases.

    2: Is a new Britney Spears album in demand? Maybe not for you, but several million teenagers think you're wrong, and who are you to say you've got better taste than them? First lesson of economics: demand = value. Amazing how many people forget this.

    3: The way you talk, you'd think that all commercial music was Britney and Spice Girls. Oh, right, I'm sorry, I forgot that there are no commercially-produced CDs in your collection. Well, if I'm wrong, surely those CDs have some value? Right? Or are you going to say that the tons of good work that gets produced by thousands of recording artists every year is worth nothing?

    As much as I hate what the RIAA is doing, arguments like yours make me want to side with them. I care about music because it makes my life better. If music has no value to you, I don't know why you even care whether you can download it for free or not.

    -- Yoz

  8. Re:Access to music by kilgore_47 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Of course, the problem with Napster was that the stuff got too freely distributed, cutting out the whole "pay the artist for thier work" step.

    REAL ARTISTS HAVE DAY JOBS

    --
    ___
    The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
  9. Non-touring older musicians: cry me a river by Weasel+Boy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Aging musicians who can't tour anymore should do what ditch diggers and automobile assembly workers and engineers and pretty much everone else does: Save up for their retirement during their working years!

    Why should artists (and the corporate scum who exploit them) be the only people who continue to get paid for years and years, for work they did once? If I stopped producing new intellectual creative works (of engineering) today, my gravy train would be cut off tomorrow. No residuals, no speaking engagements, no MTV retrospectives. Why the hell should artists be different?

  10. Re:Glad to see... by LionKimbro · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We're obviously biased towards Linux, and against the RIAA.

    We value certain things, and think certain ways, and have never set up illusion otherwise.

    It's called a community.

  11. Re:Think About This by startled · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "If you do not like how the Record company handles things, boycotting them is fine but STEALING their copyrights through P2P networks is not justified."

    Perhaps capitalizing does something to the definition of a word that I'm not aware of, but I'll assume for the purposes of this discussion that such a mutation is not built into the English language. Now, no one has ever stolen a copyright over a P2P network. It's impossible. Why? Two reasons:

    1. when I download something via a P2P network, the person whose machine I copied it from still has it. That pretty much makes it impossible to steal anything.

    2. I download mp3's, not copyrights. What P2P network are you on?

    What-- you think I'm being flippant, or dodging the issue? I'm not, but the RIAA is (as are you). This is not an issue of stealing. No one's stealing anything over P2P networks. You still have it when I download it. Why do they talk about stealing instead of copyright infringement? Because stealing makes it sound like you're taking money away from some poor artist; copyright infringement makes it sound like you're cutting into the recording industry's profits. If they got too in-depth and started talking about real issues, everyone would realize in a second what disgusting slime these people are. As long as they can bog people down in the typical platitudes of "two wrongs don't make a right" and "stealing is wrong", they never have to worry about real scrutiny. Don't be fooled.

  12. Re:Glad to see... by elefantstn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And I'm glad to see you can get modded up for the blatantly obvious observation that /. isn't an impartial news source. Thanks, Sherlock.

    Oh, and did you see how the Microsoft icon is Bill Gates looking like the Borg? I think that there may be a little anti-MS bias here, too.

    --
    If it ain't broke, you need more software.
  13. Re:Access to music by Kris_J · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't understand why the debate about music on the Internet needs to go beyond MP3.com's original service (not their "My MP3.com" crap with the commerical CDs that ehy got sued for). MP3.com lets artists freely upload their music to be freely downloaded by anyone. Why do we need to bother with the RIAA or any of the artists they "represent" ever again? Just stop buying CDs from your local supermarket, or whatever, and start downloading new music from a couple of interesting categories on MP3.com. How hard is that?

  14. Re:Tim O'Reilly comes through again by RadioheadKid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Your kidding right? You don't see the point. Mundie and Rosen were picked just for that reason, to show what we're up against. The old, know your opponent...Yeah this guy has no idea what he's doing, O'Reilly GPL'ed the Linux Device Driver book to encourage the development of Linux drivers, that company must be crazy...They're actually trying to help the community..that's unbelievable..

    --
    "Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
  15. Re:Glad to see... by Sarcasmooo! · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oh please. I would love to see some of the people who complain about bias explain to me how you can run a site where the content is generated by the readers without opinions showing up. That comment was made (by me), and I have opinions just like all the other readers. Why not complain that Slashdot doesn't filter out biased comments under the story itself? It would make as much sense. I find it hard to understand how people get their panties in a bunch even when it's an editor making an opinionated comment after the story. Are we all so stupid that we need opinions to be labelled for us? It's a different story when an opinion is being presented as fact, but if you can point out that kind of blatant lie by an editor, then I'll give you a cookie. Meanwhile you're just schmucks, nitpicking your own personally generated content for being personal; while I'm sure you're likely to get your nightly news from MSNBC, or CNN, where you can't bitch and complain about bias because the professional bullshitters don't bother to state their predispositions; they just decide what you can and can't see.

  16. Re:Well... by ksheff · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I always took that quote as them providing a reason why you should go see their concert ie. new music will be performed and not the same old stuff you've seen them do before. The promotion of the album is for the recoding company's benefit and as a way to try to get increased visibility. Before they got recoding contracts, bands most likely made money by their performances and any merchandise they had available for sale. That's one of the reasons why they got a recording contract in the first place. Selling more albums helps them get more airplay and other promotional help from the label which then helps them draw bigger crowds. Whether they make money on it is dependent on the deals they've made with the promoters, how extravagant they want to be, and/or how much they have to pay the label for recording costs.

    --
    the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs