RIAA, This Is Earth, Please Come In!

ccnull writes "You might remember George Ziemann as the musician who found his own music banned from eBay because it was recorded on CD-R. Now he's back with a new rant about the RIAA's statistics, which blame piracy for the dire condition of the music industry. What's to blame? Price hikes and fewer titles. The latest rant (including analysis of the RIAA's own data) is mainly circulating by email, here's a readable link. (As an interesting side note, Ziemann says that songs are really just ads for CDs, and thus should be freely traded.)"

Comments

Re:RIAA has no hard numbers on piracy

[fishbowl]

I was thinking about this, and decided that the RIAA does not use the word "piracy" to represent copyright related crimes, nearly as often as slashdotters do. We are reinforcing the même more than they do. Nobody in the record industry has ever made a serious claim that copying music is equivalent to robbery and murder. They have gotten as far as calling it "theft", which is not altogether unreasonable. Congress went too far with the DMCA, but that's more your and my fault than the RIAA's.