Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
Tech Public Policy stuff