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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.
maybe they'll sue themselves out of business, lawyers ain't cheap and even if they bust half of the teens they prosecute they won't recoup their losses
going after users doesn't work, ask the DEA
stupid wars on freedom waste time and money, why not go the way of BMG and at least attempt to make a profit from it insted of trying to slow your demise.. death to teh riaa
their profits will be -$2,000,000,000 and they will claim it's "Due to piracy".
:-)
The funny thing is, they'll be more correct than any of the other times they have made that statement.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Say I own the "rights" to 500 songs. I bought the CD, tape, payed for an individual mp3 download, whatever.
/tunes shared out.
How is offering them over napster servers any more illegal then what a library does? If user X downloads them, and keeps them permanently, or sells them, or otherwise violates HIS local copyright statutes, I don't see how that's my fault for simplying for having
Can they leagally go after the people with legitamate MP3s who happen to make them available on the internet or those who illegally download them?
To better explain: if I leave my doors unlocked and someone steals my CDs I may be a moron for not locking my doors, but I certainly didn't commit a crime (the thief did).
Also, if User A has a Old97s CD and legit MP3 copies of the disc on his machine and I also own the same Old97s CD and download his copies (instead of burning my own) did either of us break a law?
I am sorta hazy over both issues.
go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly illegal.
While it could be argued that RIAA is just taking an expedient course of action, this is the one thing that they should have done.
Go after the burglars - don't penalize the manufacturers of crowbars.
I'd just as soon live in a free society where I have my choice of combining Napster with crowbars as long as I don't infringe on someone else's rights.
However, I will admit that trading an MP3 from a CD of mine that I've ripped to someone I don't know for a song which I don't have constitutes a commercial transaction (albeit cashless) and, while copyright exists, the possessors of the it should have the exclusive right to charge for distribution. Exactly and only that.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
But many music executives, watching revenue sag as home compact-disc copying has soared, feel that they have little choice if they are to save their business. World-wide music sales dropped 5% last year, while global sales of compact-disc albums declined for the first time since CDs were launched in 1983. So far this year, U.S. music sales are down steeply from a sluggish 2001.
/., but I have to say it again. If they would just realize that people WANT digital music that they can download and throw onto a custom CD/MP3 player/etc, then they could give this up now! Yes, there'd still be copying of CDs, and all that, but it would drop. If they have lost revenue because of filesharing, not their own lack of quality, then setting up a system where we can buy ONE song would do wonders for their revenues. They are, bluntly, idiots.
Or could it be because people are getting fed up with the latest crap from Britnay Spears and N'sync? I have bought 5 albums in as many years. They were all albums that I knew I would enjoy, start to finish (w/ maybe 1 or 2 songs as exceptions). I didn't buy the same album over, and over, and over again.
Hell, I download a few songs that I want to hear, but there's no way I'm paying for an album for one song. I know that argument has long been shouted loudly and proudly from our ranks here on
On a side note, RE: the article, I don't see how they can get someone beyond reasonable doubt. It's a simple matter to give the HD a complete wipe (7 times over, 1s and 0s) and users can just claim that they downloaded a song from Kazaa to hear it before they bought an album. The only way they could truly "get" someone is if the user had perpetually downloaded copies of the same song.
Anyway, that's my $.02
Later.
That suing your customers is NOT good marketing...
Anyone care to speculate how hard it'd be to graft some sort of encryption into Gnutella? Stuff that deliberately obfuscates IP addresses, etc, at least enough to make it hard to identify users?
BTW, wouldn't breaking such encryption be a DMCA violation?
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
IANAL, but wouldn't a shared warning file protect you?
Have it say something like, "By downloading files from my computer, the recipient agrees not to press charges resulting from the contents of the file."
Hell, it's about as legal as a EULA.
World-wide music sales dropped 5% last year, while global sales of compact-disc albums declined for the first time since CDs were launched in 1983. So far this year, U.S. music sales are down steeply from a sluggish 2001.
Name one GOOD album that was released this year (Mainstream please)! I cant think of ONE MP3 that I have downloaded that was released in the last two years...
put out a quality producat and people WILL buy it, music today is like the "K-car" or the 80s... no soul...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
They sued Napster, it pushed people to true P2P networks like Gnutella. Now they go after the people on the networks, won't this just push people to something like Freenet? (Freenet masks users and files so it'd be more difficult to target specific people for trading specific things)
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
I wish I have your assurance on this one. Remember not long time ago a article (news.com methinks) about woman fired over having some mp3 on her comp at work? This is where they gonna start, effectively forcing companies to ban fileswappin and mp3-listening @ work (lets not talk about company resources, working comp for work and all other related issues)
This (I expect) will kill effectevely about 30 to 50% of possible users. Then, on much clean ground, they will sue couple ISPs and get them involved somehow. AND THIS IS IT. ISPs will fight rest of swappers to the end of contract. If file swapping will be reduced to 5-10% of current, It would be effectively "RIP Swapping -- 2006". And then, as you can imagine, they will come with "new, cost effective, legal" way to sell music over internet.
Screw us ?
On the basis that the RIAA has been found guilty by the FTC of price fixing, AGAIN... It would at the very least make things a little less black and white...
And might sway a jury.
Remember, in the USA, jurors have the right of "jury nullification", to judge that the criminal is the LAW in question, not the accused...
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
And everyone who has ever downloaded an mp3 you've put in to a file-sharing system has been your personal friend? Someone you have met/spoken with frequently/some other activity generally shared among friends? Or are they strangers from around the world and you have no idea who they really are?
You are stretching the definition of "friend" just a bit.
-r
Just because something is free does not mean you have to take it.
Tell me, who gets hurt when I download that new Britney Spears song?
You do. Ugh.
All kidding aside, you're just wrong, for reasons that I guess I won't be able to explain to you. Taking something without paying for it is wrong. In this case, it also happens to be illegal. If you would acknowledge that it's wrong, and that you shouldn't do it, but that you do it anyway, then you and I could see eye-to-eye. I have no problem at all with hypocrites. I'm a huge hypocrite myself in a lot of ways.* But I do have a problem with people who can't seem to understand basic issues of right and wrong. That saddens and disturbs me.
* Not with respect to downloading MP3s, though. I was on an MP3 kick for a while about three years ago, but I quickly got bored with it. The music was all of absurdly low quality, and it was more trouble than it was worth to find and download stuff I liked. So I ditched all of the pirated stuff and ripped my collection of 300+ CDs at high bit rate instead, and ran cables to wire my server (upstairs) into my stereo (downstairs). It's about nine days of music on continuous random shuffle. Much better than the crap I got off of Napster. Ugh.