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RIAA to Sue You Now
An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC reports that apparently the music industry feels so satisfied with going after file swapping software makers that they want to sue the pants off the file swappers themselves. Of course, you'll need to be a big fish with lots of illegal music to get their attention." This is what they should have done in the first place- go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly
illegal.
"Filing suits against individual users is complicated. Entertainment companies frequently hire services that specialize in tracking copyrighted material online. But to get the name of an individual user, they have to send a subpoena to that person's Internet-service provider. Even for the ISP, linking the Internet address to a name can be complex. Moreover, it's hard to verify which person was logged on to an Internet connection at a given time."
So in other words to find most individual users they will have to invest time+money, yeah this'll fly for an association thats primary concern is profit!!
crazy dynamite monkey
This isn't about an industry that is feeling smug and self-assured...This is a LAST DITCH EFFORT to assert their right to exist. And in the long run, I don't think its going to work.
RIP RIAA -- 2006
The RIAA has tried (successfully) to paint P2P networks as festering cesspools of piracy and other sorts of illegal activity. I think this is part of the reason P2P networking has not been used to come up with more innovative technologies. Also, independent artists -- who could benefit immensely from distributing their music through P2P instead of through recording companies -- have been reluctant to embrace P2P as a truly new way of doing business.
So this might be good. Granted, the RIAA won't _stop_ prosecuting P2P networks, but at least they'll be shifting some of the blame to the people who actually use these networks for illegal activity.
But it won't help them. People like free music, and they'll fight tooth and nail when you try to take it away from them. Imagine the public backlash they'll have when they trace some huge fileswapper, have the Feds bust down their doors, only to find that their suspect is a 15-year-old whose father works at a university and whose mother is a nurse. They'll have to arrest someone, and no matter who they do, they'll be setting themselves up for negative publicity. Online file-sharers will be galvanized to the "cause" of free music, and the RIAA's troubles will continue to pile up.
Companies like the RIAA and the MPAA are going to go out of business. Period. When people have the ability to make an infinite number of copies of your product, at virtually no cost, you can't make money anymore. It's as simple as that.
Use of object has absolutely nothing to do with the legality of that object. If it did, scissors would be illegal because you could kill someone with 'em. Rather stupid, I know, but I'd rather not see P2P die out because it's being used for piracy NOW and the system itself is found illegal rather then down the road when networks like these might actually be productive.
We've now reached the endgame... When the whole music industry comits mass suicide like Metallica did when filing suit against 300,000 of it's own fans.
I've been waiting for this to happen, as this will push things to a final resolution.
BTW, Why can I buy a movie that has been out for 3-4 months for $15-16 on DVD, with extra features, etc, but a 20 year old album costs more than that? I can buy DVD's of older movies for around $10.
Yet, DVD sales boom. The best anti-piracy protection is reasonable prices. So long as the RIAA engages in illegal, anti-competitive practices (the FTC found them guilty of CD price fixing again), I say they deserve whatever happens to them.
It's a Mexican standoff... Pirates will pirate from P2P networks, the RIAA won't obey the law.
If it can be heard, it can be ripped. If it can be ripped, it can be traded. No amount of lawyering can change this, and indeed, the music industry will only become an even greater villian to the average Joe by the attempt.
Sell CD's for $10. Watch the sales rise. Quit wasting $millions bribing stations to play songs they will play anyway. Watch profits rise...
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
In my opinion, it's totally legal, though I'd like to see that stand up in court =P
As per the Home Audio Recording Act of 1992 (If I remember correctly), you are allowed to make infinite copies of a copyrighted material that you own the rights to for personal use, and, in that case, personal use INCLUDED giving copies to friends, as long as it wasn't for profit.
That's no different than Napster, if you ask me. I'm just giving copies to my friends, and I'm sure as hell not profitting from it.
It's a stupid idea, the second one big distributor gets busted, 3 more are going to pop up, it'll take an enourmous amount of resources to even make a dent in the supply of songs. In the meantime, they'll have to raise the prices of CDs, yet again, to finance this legal effort, and people will even buy less CDs and download more music.
They're just digging themselves deeper into their graves. They're approach should be through sound economics, not through evil lawyers (that's another issue all together!).
Give us an incentive to buy your CDs and we'll buy it. Stop blatently rip us off!
> How is offering them over napster servers any more illegal then what a library does?
Here and there in the midst of all this discussion, I've occasionally run across an estimate from the publishing industry that each book sold is read on the average four times. One of their interests is cutting this number down and making people pay for the books they read.
Now, I have very few books that I've ever loaded out to anyone, and I doubt if any of my couple hundred books have been read by three other people. So where could all these extra readers be coming from?
Right. Libraries. The publishing industry doesn't make much of a public fuss of it, but one of the goals that they are starting to consider reachable is using the growing copyright restrictions to shut down public libraries. In the eyes of publishers, libraries are nothing but open copyright violations. All the arguments being made about "piracy" apply directly to libraries.
In the 1800's, the development of the public library system was one of the really significant advances in public education. We are seeing an attempt to end this social experiment, and to restrict education to those who can afford the publishers' price.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
As I understand the Gnutella protocol, this is possibly although none of the present clients have such a feature. When Gnutella first came out I toyed with the idea of building a Python-based client which allowed you to limit searches to one host. I might be wrong, but this is how it would be done, assuming your target host has given all their MP3 files a ".mp3" extension:
If this is true, and if it isn't then no doubt someone will correct me, then I am surprised why nobody has implemented this feature.
ian.
ian
Just because I can't afford all those CDs, should I not be allowed to listent to music? [...] And don't tell me to listen to the radio, because radio sucks ass.
Well... um... yes. If you don't want to listen to free music, and you don't want to (or can't) pay for music, then you don't get any music. That how a capitalist market economy works.
I guess you could make the case that being deprived of music is a moral wrong, and try to get somebody with money to back a charity for people who can't afford music. A church would probably be willing to help you out, but I'm not sure you'd care for their selection.
Your other option is to hum.
Or you could look at it from another viewpoint, that of the record industry. See, the record industry has been bitching and moaning about this big problem that they created due to their own greed. It's called payola. They have to pay so that the music they sell gets exposure to listeners around the country and around the world. They have been doing this forever. First they were paying radio stations to play their songs. Then when that was outlawed, they started paying some middleman to pay radio stations to play their songs. Now they're complaining that it's just too expensive and that the government should put a stop to it, boo hoo hoo. Oh yeah, and in the meantime, they are going to shut down napster and kazaa and anyone else that gets their music out to listeners around the world. Can't have that happening, can we.
Now you might say that people who download songs will just listen to them on their computer and never pay for the CD, but I don't think there's any evidence that that happens on a wide enough scale to really have that much of an impact, and there is a decent amount of evidence that seems to say that Napster and others have had a positive impact on CD sales. I think that what the record industry should really do is work on their public relations problem. Get rid of Rosen and put an artist or several artists in her spot. They don't even have to be Britney-class superstars, and in fact, they shouldn't be. They should represent the vast majority of artists that make something around minimum wage or a little better. Kind of like the artistic middle class. They could help to persuade people that artists really need their support in order to continue to make the music that the fans love. That could probably make a huge impact on people. But if they really want to make it work, then they should knock off all the damn price-fixing crap and lower the price of CDs. They should probably stick an MSRP price on each CD too, so that stores couldn't just double the price without facing some serious questions. I think that the statement to fans would be that the record industry wants to do good by them and help them find the music they like and help artists to make a good living. Oh, and they would save all those millions that they've been flushing down the payola toilet too. Now most of us can't imagine this happening in a million years, but if anyone has the muscle to get a message out to fans, it's the record industry.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
No, the idea is to prevent end users from getting exposed to musicians who don't have contracts with RIAA labels.
That's the reality underlying "concerns about piracy" and artists being enlisted behind industry propaganda and payola, why LP FM radio has been given so much trouble, etc. and why Internet Radio is being shut down in the US.
The RIAA wants a situation where an artist who wants to make a living in music must be signed to an RIAA label. An artist who sells music otherwise isn't contributing towards the lifestyles of the suits at record companies. The RIAA suits consider this immoral and where possible, something to be made illegal.
I'm sure that the record industry knows that the P2P networks can be quite reasonably seen as a group of individuals promoting music for RIAA companies and artists at their own expense. This isn't what they have problems with.
The problem is that since the RIAA has no control over these channels, there's no way to prevent them from presenting the music of musicians not signed to RIAA labels.
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