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The RIAA Hit List - A Pattern Emerges?
Desus writes "Slyck News seems to have found a pattern in just what files the RIAA is searching on to find offenders. It seems the RIAA is targeting a wide reach of music, including Hip Hop, R&B, Rap, Rock, Pop and Country songs. Artists such as Ludacris, Michael Jackson, NAS, Busta Rhymes, Keith Sweat and Musiq were very common throughout the subpoenas. They've even created a helpful chart showing exactly what artists and songs seem to get one flagged." Update: 07/31 13:12 GMT by H : Here's another source for the chart.
Hint: put only one type of data in each cell. When you mix data in a single cell, it makes it very hard to sort or analyze. For instance, this spreadsheet has two colums: "Artist" and "Song title (times appearing)".
Would it have been that hard to break out time appearing into another column, so interested people could actually *use* the data for something? No. In fact, it would have been *less* work.
Sorry to bitch and moan, but spreadsheet abuse is one of my pet peeves.
Cheers
-b
THe article claims that from 50 total subpoenas being checked, they can deduce overall proportions of artist representation in the subpoenas, which is, frankly, a load of crock; with a sample size that small, margin of error would be enormous. Oh, and by the way, it's not like the RIAA needs to limit itself to these artists of these songs, they just happen to be what they were searching for to trigger some results, and with the huge body of work protected by the RIAA, I imagine that if it were not for simple lack of motivation, they could easily cycle through an enormous number of searches to perform... Perhaps they'll do exactly this each time someone tries to analyze their "pattern"...
What a stupid chart. If you're going to go through all the trouble of making an Excel spreadsheet why not create a proper spreadsheet and put the number of times a song was mentioned in its own column? See, now it's even more useful because I can sort by the number of times a song was mentioned to see what the most popular one was instead of having to scan the whole list manually. Simple, no?
And then you don't have to figure out if the number in brackets is actually the number of times it was mentioned or maybe makes up part of the title. If I was being pedantic and took the "Title (Times song appears)" column header to be gospel, then the Jay-Z song "I Just Wanna Love U" has been mentioned "Give It 2 Me" times, and the Ludacris song "Cry Babies" has been mentioned "Oh No" times. What is this? How many is "Oh No"?
OK, so how do WE download the real files?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Hi!
One of the reasons the RIAA is targeting a specific group of files (in addition to target market, etc.) is that the RIAA is acting, legally, as the agent of the copyright owner. The RIAA doesn't own the copyrights to the music--generally, neither do the record labels. The "artists" (using the term very broadly in a few cases) own the copyrights, and the RIAA is acting on their behalf. They're looking for U2 files because U2 has given them permission to haul kids into court on a trumped-up infringement action.
Which might give you pause, next time you're in the record store looking to buy a CD.
Which brings me to an interesting idea:
If you see the name of an artist you admire--and perhaps support with your hard-earned dollar--why not drop an email to the artist asking why he or she is supporting the draconian actions of the RIAA? As always, it pays to be polite--screamers just get ignored (or reinforce the "they're all crooks" attitudes). But a few hundred polite, irenic notes might just change a few attitudes.
And a few hundred thousand polite irenic notes might just drum some sense into the musicians.