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:yup

[Anonymous Coward]

Taking copyrighted mp3's off of Kazaa, Morpheus, or whatever is unethical -- yes, unethical:

Hey now, don't push your stupid backwards fundie morals on me. Whats right for you isn't always right for me, ever think about it?

Not the same quality, and it's MY income,

[jonskerr]

not theirs.

Regarding the quality issue, an MP3 is NOT the same. A CD is 320 bps, most mp3s are 128 or 160 bps. And at least for me, I'll download songs I would never buy. There's been a long-standing position among file-sharers that the record companies still have it to sell to a buyer. And even though they like to cry about lost revenues, they have plenty of people willing to pay.

The second issue is your use of the terms piracy and rip-off. All of America is a huge ripoff. (At least where I live.) All big businesses are involved in ripping off whatever they can grab and scratch and pry loose. The record companies rip off the artists and turn around and get ripped off by file-sharing. The phone company charges $85 for a tech to drive by your house. The CEO kills his company, drives its stock from $50 a share to $2.50, and walks away with a hundred million dollars. Executive compensation in American companies since the Reagin years increased far and away over what similar European companies' executives make. A one-bedroom apartment costs 35% of a working person's monthly income in large cities. Or more. And the landlord doesn't maintain the property but lives in comfort and luxury. So if you want to feel sorry for the record companies feel free, but their stockholders and executives aren't going without health insurance, they're going without a second vacation home. Wah-wah fucking wah.

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.