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CEO of RIAA Speaks at P2P Conference
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.
Anyone got a recording of his speech? I don't feel like readind today?
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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.
Great. Now I'll never look at a big wad of bills the same way again.
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.
If I were you, I would try to stay away from any wad of Bill's. Ew. It's just unclean.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
[tommorow's news]
A hacker known only as VA Software has been arrested today for attempting to distribute an illegal digital copy of Hilary Rosen's recent speech. The RIAA informed the FBI of the breach of copyright under the DMCA and immediately moved to arrest VA Software.
In other news, the hacker web site known as Slashdot was shut down and one of it's members was arrested for an attack on riaa.com. The attack has been described by sources within Slashdot's membership as the "Slashdot effect."
[/tomorrow's news]
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!
Call me pedantic but I hate how the RIAA keeps calling the downloading of music files via p2p software piracy. It is copyright infringement. Period. It is closer to piracy what the RIAA does to "its" artists.
I know there are some artists trying to buck RIAA stranglehold but I'm waiting for the day when big artists (remember The Offspring's attempt to make _Conspiracy of One_ available for download?) get out from under the big studios and the RIAA.
Glad to see that story submissions are always un-biased on
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
There's a bit of a chicken and egg thing, though. Most rock musicians (I am one, so I can say this) just aren't very bright folks.
:)
I remember reading a story about how Lynyrd Skynyrd got screwed out of their royalties. They were all high school dropouts (they were named after the principal of their high school, who threw/pushed them out, Leonard Skinner) and when they were presented with the contract, they could not read. They signed it anyway (without going to a lawyer to interpret it for them) on the side of some interstate in Florida.
So who's worse - the band for being too dumb to know the value of education or to cover their ass, or the record companies for taking advantage of that? In their case, it's about equal, coming from their background. However, there are some artists that have never had a chance for an education, but they have this raw talent, and the record company just rapes them and tosses them out when they get old/fat/non-trendy. It's really a case-by-case thing.
For the record, Lars is an idiot, too
Courtney Love gave a speech last year about the topic of music theft, and the roles that Napster and the RIAA play in that theft. A brief quote:
Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software. I'm talking about major label recording contracts.
The full text of Love's speech can be found here.
It is an interesting read, particularly if you contrast it with Rosen's (ahem) desire to protect the artists and ensure that the artists are fairly compensated...
I wonder if Hillary was able to keep a straigh face during her speech!
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
(Please save your flames until you've read the whole post)
She does have some legitimate points. Personally, as a musician, and one who plans to make music a career, I want to be able to have the same opportunity to make money as anyone else. I don't want to be rich, I just want to be able to live comfortably.
However, the foundation of her argument is flawed. Artists get a ridiculously small percentage of CD sales, and this isn't changing even as CD prices close on the twenty dollar mark.
Artists get most of their money from concerts. Albums are basically just advertising. File-sharing programs are more effective advertising (People like free things). If more people are listening to their music because the price barrier isn't there, then more people will go to their concerts, putting more money in the artists' pockets. This is a good thing.
The only artists who are speaking out against file sharing programs are artists that A) don't need any more money, and B) don't understand that this actually helps less mainstream artists.
Basically, what it comes down to for me is this: If I'm dinking around on Limewire, Napster, Morpheus, or any other music-swapping program and I come an mp3 of one of my songs, I'm not disappointed. I'm not feeling the money fly out of my wallet. I'm elated. I'm absolutely ecstatic that someone would take the time to download my music and keep it on their hard drive. They've done this because they like it, not because of money or any other impetus. That's half the reason that I want to be a musician (Incidentally, the other half is that I hate/suck at everything else): to create something that people like - that touches people. It's a wonderful thing when this can occur outside of a corporate environment, outside of the store. If my music was flying all over the 'net and I was living in the street, that would be a different matter, but that's just not how it works.
Anyway, that's just what I think...
(Does anyone else find the Gates-esque overuse of the word innovation and derivations thereof rather disturbing?)
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
Hillary Rosen says,
Note that she doesn't claim that they in the recording business respect artists or their work themselves. Courtney Love's rant on the piracy of the recording industry makes for educational reading. Later Rosen says, And of course they are. Look at the profits of the major labels. The problem being of course, is that this is monetary value, and further, they are much more valuable to the labels than the artists once the rights have been signed away.The language in the speech is emotive, as is to be expected. But the kiddie porn quote is surely beyond the pale,
And the very companies that the RIAA represent publish and promote music with hate-lyrics.We also have the old chestnut of referring to illegal copying as theft. Repeatedly. This should be plain enough, but many people seem to have bought the lie. Illegal copying is just that. It may well be damaging to the creators of the material (which is probably wrong) as well as to the distributors (which is not necessarily wrong - people don't have a right to make a profit, remember!). What it is not though, is theft. Let alone piracy. The debate on intellectual property is muddied enough as it is, without resorting to misleading language.
I think the most poignant quote though is,
This is so true. Sadly, it's the piracy of the recording industry - which has, among other things, managed to have artists' work reclassified as work for hire (!) - that is responsible for artists living in poverty while simultaneously having millions of CD sales. The term piracy is much more applicable to this sort of action; what these labels do is not illegal copying, but the wholesale transfer of rights from the artist to themselves using the big stick of exclusive access to mainstream distribution channels.If you have an interest in the music industry and not yet read the Salon article linked above, you really ought. It's very educational.
PS: If you do want to support artists, there is always Fairtunes.
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
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?
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
"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.
In the music industry, Artists get paid sweet FA, they obviously don't have a union, and they don't go on strike to get a better deal when they are being done over.
Ao what Artists need to do is form a union, and unite against their employers, the recording industry. If they don't do this, then they don't deserve any more money.
The fact is, P2P music copying:
1) Gets music spread around more - increasing the chance of it being purchased legitimately
2) Doesn't mean that without the P2P the music would have been bought
3) or that a sale was lost as a result of the P2P download
4) Sure, some people will download music and not buy CDs as a result. These people are a significant minority who previously recorded their friends' CDs onto tape anyway
The fact is, the RIAA exist for the artists for several reasons - to provide recording facilities, and to advertise the artist. P2P does the advertising, and thus takes away one of the reasons for artists to use a major record label. The other one is less necessary as computer technology improves to the state where a personal music studio is a few thousand dollars, and can match a professional music studio from a few years ago for features.
The RIAA really need DVD Audio, with videos to differentiate their products from P2P. P2P is a competitor, and they want this competition legislated out of existence. For example, the Static X song, Black and White (kicks ass) is available on DVD with the (kick ass) video, and other videos of the band. This is worth buying as a reasonable price.
Are you sure we're talking about the right Bill and Hillary in the context of a 'wad'?
I don't think Bill will be shooting a wad at Hillary anytime soon.
-20 Sick & twisted
Reboot macht Frei.
Before copyrights, we got Mozart and Bach. After copyrights, we get Britney Spears and N'Sync. I think the argument that copyrights are necessary in order to create great music are a little thin...