Slashdot Mirror
Webcaster Alliance Threatens To Sue RIAA
detroitindustrial writes "The Washington Post reports that the Webcaster Alliance is threatening to sue the RIAA under the Sherman Antitrust Act. In their letter to the RIAA, the Webcaster Alliance alleges that the RIAA and the Voice of Webcasters negotiated in collusion and, 'were apparently intent on either eliminating their competitors and/or raising barriers to entry in the market for small commercial webcasting.' It goes on to say that the RIAA also wanted to eliminate smaller webcasters, who tend to play more independent material, in order to maintain their monopoly on music distribution."
Monopolistic Corporations sue you.
Oh wait..
because if you don't behave, I too will write a letter I won't show you threatening to sue you.
And then I'll tell slashdot. Muahahahaha!
whose acronym is VOW. Or is that just me?
Although many people here at slashdot don't agree with the RIAA and their anti digital stance I think that we have to have some sympathy with them here. Unlike traditional radio it is easy to make copys of songs that have been webcasted and then place them on peer to peer networks such as bittorrent and napster. What inevitably happens is that people will record internet radio stations all day and then put all the CD quality songs up for download, thereby harming the music industry.
What might be a better idea is to limit webcasting to unsigned bands that need the publicity. In this way we could listen to tracks first before buying and the inevitable piracy would actually work in favour of the music industry.
All that glitters has a high refractive index.
Not to sound like trolling but looking at the number of lawsuits being filed these days, legal profession seems very appealing compared to IT and so far it hasn't been affected by outsourcing either !!
In the end a lone voice will be heard... "Needs more cowbell."
Yes..start calling them the Webcaster Alliance ;)
If one can sue over copyright infringment based of a reppetitive set of tones, what is to stop someone from generating millions of tonal combintations with a computer copyrighting the lot of them and suing every "artist" that ends up duplicating them?
Oh, sure. Next you'll be telling me that someone can just copyright all possible Phone Numbers?
--
uhm, you might just want to consider listening to a different music genre and reconsider that thought. I think having to put artist is parenthesis should have tipped you off.
If you disagree then it must be overrated, redundant or trolling.
Thank you for your deep contribution to this /. discussion.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Lots of potential lawsuits here.
-Harry Belafonte suing for the use of the word "banana". Chiquita might get in on the action too.
Jim Henson productions, the song title is an obvious knockoff of "It's not Easy Being Green"
Why limit yourself to just music? If a CD-ROM holds 700MB (4,900,000,000 bits), then there are 2^4900000000 potential CDs. Patent them all, and sue any and everyone who releases a CD-ROM.
... :)
By the way, one of those disks will have Taco's editor password on it.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
Actually, unless his password is 700 MB long, then quite a few would have his password, along with every password on /. and every comment that can possibly be posted, as well as every possible moderation variation on those comments. The ASCII goatse troll would get a +5 Insightful! The world as we know it would collapse (most likely, under the weight of the CDs required to hold all of the combinations).
There would also be one with a really REALLY huge number of digits of pi.
Let me preface this by saying it's not goatse. This is funny as hell though. RIAA Personified Maybe it will feel the wrath of being slashdotted?
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Just patent the case where all bits are 0, and sue blank CD manufacturers - you'd only need one patent, and you'd get a fair share of the total money you would get in patenting all possibilities.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
VOW member 1: Tell him about the Twinkie, Ray
VOW member 2: looking concerned What Twinkie?
All's true that is mistrusted
Microsoft uses $40 billion pile of cash to buy RIAA. When questioned about the controversial move a spokesman was quoted as saying "We couldn't resist, we just liked their style."