Slashdot Mirror
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.
Once those songs are less populated, they'll go after other ones.
What would be more interesting is the percentage of subpoenas there are for each ISP. I've heard rumors of how AOL users are more immune, simply because of their Time Warner affiliation.
While I have no sympathy for those that choose to distributed copyrighted works on P2P networks without the copyright owner's permission, I don't understand why customers not using an ISP owned by the same holding company as the record companies should get in trouble first.
On the other hand, maybe AOL can leverage this to attract more subscribers. It's no longer "823451 hours for free", it's "music and movies for free"! Heh.
Of course, if the scare tactic doesn't pan out, eventually AOL users won't be safe either.
"You've got jail!"
The one pattern I see is that the overwhelming number of the artists seem to be those that appeal to under 25's. Obviously the RIAA have decided to go for those who can least afford to offer legal resistance (school kids and college students).
Come on RIAA, dare you to pick on us Lou Reed fans!
Amen, brother.
I've got a couple of friends running a couple of (very) small labels, and quite a few more in bands ... and their basic feeling about the whole thing is that sooner or later people might eventually clue in, realise they're risking jail time to listen to music that's worse than white noise on the cheap ...
Basically, they think the shittier it is to listen to shitty music, all the better for them. They don't think that they'll be getting any of the money or the fame, but it'll bring a lot of actual spirit and dynamism back to the currently-small indie crowd.
Maybe more than 1% of the N. Am. population will start to care about music again.
Don't put salt in your eyes.
They've even created a helpful chart
And please tell me what is helpful about a chart written for a product I do not own? This is the internet people! What is so hard about creating a simple table using um....tables? You can view them for free!
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
I realized the second they told the public they were going to sue. So what I did was I decreased the amount of shared files I have by making copies of songs that are uncommon, and whos artists probably are not good friends of the RIAA. I share these songs only now, so if you want some good ol' Final Fantasy 7 theme music, just run a quick search! ;-)
;-)
What the RIAA is accomplishing, is simply seriously decreasing the amount of shares on P2P networks, leaving only pr0n and unknown artists.
Me, I'm set with my Russian servers.... Good ol' Mother Russia, land of the oppressed hackers
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
There was a big mix, pop music that only teenagers would be caught dead with, some 90's better music, and then some older stuff like GFA and Fleetwood Mac.
I have to say that the most surprising song on there was My Iron Lung by Radiohead. Radiohead is hugely popular. Kid A sold tons (and granted they went after one song from it). Their next, Amnesiac was good. Their live album which followed was good as well. Their brand new album is great. The RIAA passed up these 3 albums entirely and went after a non-single on an album 8 years old.
They did the same thing with Release by Pearl Jam. I actually want to meet that person. They must own the album. Who downloads Release who doesn't own Ten?
Mudvayne, one of my favorite bands, isn't on the list. In fact, none of my favorite bands seem to be on the list. Interestingly enough, while on tour with Metallica, "[Mudvayne] Lead singer Chad Gray encouraged those who did not have The End of All Things to Come to get it by any means, including CD burning and MP3s" according to MTV news. Looks like some bands are figuring out how to become more popular at least.
In the last five years or so, the Internet has gone from being fairly calm and safe, to more and more of a virtual reality war zone. Viruses and worms are one front, security holes and exploits are another, intellectual property "theft" and counter-tactics... and counter-counter-tactics are another, spam and filters and anti-spam are yet another. Those early books by William Gibson aren't too far off the mark anymore!
It is interesting that the Internet was viewed as a kind of egalitarian utopia not too long ago. Some people still hold this view, but in reality, it is becoming a constant war zone.
I wonder if all this could have been avoided if the internet was not commercialized? Is all this conflict going to destroy the Internet's potential fertility?
I think that there is no policy, no law, no technology which can create peace on the Internet. I personally think that the Internet is rather a microcosm of what is happening at a slower pace in the "real" world. And that can only be fixed by a fundamental change in the way that people (everyone in the whole world) think. It's like the cold war's arms race. At some point, everyone is going to have to realize that it is getting ridiculous and everyone is losing out because of that.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Slashdot readers are fantastic.
Most interesting stories are mirrored in the comments. Which is great, especially when it concerns a story at NYT (which there should be less of), due to the registration requirements, I don't go to the site anymore.
But the thing that really hit me with this riaa story is that someone who provided information in excel format was good enough to share the info, but not everyone uses excel, or any microsoft products, myself included. So what do some of the slashdot readers do? They adapt, and provide a service to other readers. The excel format document was changed to html, and even OpenOffice.org format, and made available on alternate sites. Both of the formats work for me. And I haven't even read all the comments yet. It may be available in additional formats.
I had to stop and write this comment because of the greatness of the slashdot readers. I tip my hat to each of you who help make slashdot better for all of us.
Thank you.
I am baffled as to why i have yet to see this mentioned (maybe I have not looked around enough).
The only way to be able to say in court that a given user actually was making a certain file available to the public is for the RIAA to have downloaded the file themselves. (unless of course they were sniffing the traffic, but that would be illegal as well)
If they used kazaa to download from users to find out that they had an "illegal" file they would violate kazaa licence terms
"2 What You Can't Do Under This Licence" sub sections:
"2.11 Monitor traffic or make search requests in order to accumulate information about individual users;",
"2.12 "Stalk" or otherwise harass another;" and
"2.14 Collect or store personal data about other users."
If they somehow reverse engineered kazaa to make their own client and avoid the above licence stipulations they would have run afoul of:
"3.2 Except as expressly permitted in this Licence, you agree not to reverse engineer, de-compile, disassemble, alter, duplicate, modify, rent, lease, loan, sublicense, make copies, create derivative works from, distribute or provide others with the Software in whole or part, transmit or communicate the application over a network."
I'm going to start downloading all sorts of music that I already own on CD, not share it, and hope they catch me. Then I can say, "but I already own that song and I wasn't sharing it with anyone! What was I doing wrong!?"
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
Yet again with with apologies to Paul Graham, I wrote it before: implement colaborative bayesian filters in all major P2P clients. Train the filters to reject RIAA known search strings, RIAA known IP numbers, RIAA known nicknames. Iterate this across all participants. Let the filters learn while RIAA try to beat themt. Go back to step 1.
Saying that any of the MS office products are the pinnacle of productivity suites is just as idiotic.
I know several "normal" people who hate the MS office suite, and I personally haven't had it installed on my computer since Office 97. I think there have always been better alternatives. When I was taking composition in college, Corel Wordperfect was much more efficient and had much better grammer checking than Word 2000/XP. I'd say Excel is quite a bit better in it's category than Word, but there are programs I much prefer over Excel.
I'm not anti-Microsoft at all, I just don't care for MS Office. I don't really know of many casual users who really like Office. Most people hate the paperclip and the automatic formatting that Office tries to help you with. Most people also think that MS Office is their only option.
I recently started using OpenOffice 1.1 and am very impressed with it's capabilities. I didn't care for 1.0 at all, but 1.1 is great. A few people who have seen it on my computer and used it have asked me to install it on theirs.
My point is, many people don't care for the MS Office suite, and yes there are several other options that people actually prefer after using them (OpenOffice, Corel, Gobe, etc).
Here's one untested way to do it, based on the sample code given (Slashcode doesn't agree well with nicely indented Perl, so I've replaced standard indentation with vertical space instead to retain some clarity):
And hey presto -- if all goes well, the spreadsheet in question should end up being magically downloaded & converted to a tab delimited table on the fly.
Now that wasn't so bad, was it? And you didn't even have to do any of the work... :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
You know, that was actually a very interesting list. You have to wonder how they arrived at it. Any one of us can probably have about 10 of these songs in our collection, but if you think about the type of person who would carry over 95% of the songs on that list, and you'll have someone who probably is creating a library of mp3's.
Who do they think they are kidding? The RIAA pretty much only publish mainstream stuff. I've just been looking at the CD labels I've bought over the last year, and none of them are RIAA members.
Maybe it's a conspiracy on the part of real musicians, let's see:
1. Prod RIAA into prosecuting anyone with pedestrian tastes in music... ...? :-)
2. Said miscreants go directly to jail.
3.
4. Err...damn, I don't see where the profit comes from
My thoughts were, these are the kinds of songs that people download because they aren't going to buy a crappy CD just for one song. Too bad the RIAA doesn't get the drift.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
If they're depending on contracted companies then I say we stay within the rules of fair use - quote 14 seconds of the song, and then fill the rest with a rant of why the RIAA must die? Exhort listeners not to buy CDs and so on. Yes, it pollutes the datastream, but it also tempts a contractor to pre-emptively sue us.
Can you imagine presenting to a judge a statement of anti-RIAA disguised as music? Want to bet you won't have a presumptive judement in your favour? Give 1000 of those and the RIAA is history.
It's time to play dirty and I am, whose with me?
A relative is a lawyer in the RIAA's legal firm and he told me that according to RIAA's extensive marketing database a demographic that is lower income/young & ethnic) was targeted because they are least likely to have the ability to defend themselves. The RIAA is still smarting somewhat after the chewplastic guy put his search engine back online after they signed the agreement. They don't want any long court battles or rich/middle class white kids that might embarass them somehow. Just victories that make you never want to contemplate messing with the 'raging bull berzerker attack' from RIAA lawyers.
Look at a music CD you have. Any CD. Look for the copyright notice in fine print (usually on the bottom part of the back of the disc jewel case). I hold in my hands a copy of U2's Best of 1980-1990 CD, and it says the copyright is held by "Polygram Records". No mention of U2 or any of the band members anywhere in the copyright notice! The record label always owns the copyright! I have a lot of CD's, and none, I repeat none of them has a copyright notice that includes the name of the band or the artist as copyright holder (not even joint copyrights). The record companies always hold the rights to everything. If you want to know how these artists are actually treated by the RIAA, here's a small article that may enlighten you as to how the system really works.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
If that's the list they're searching on, it's a complete crock. One quick look for my favorite band, Pearl Jam revealed a song on the list. Too bad they promote music trading and as far as I'm concerned if the band promotes it, I don't give two $#!+$ what the RIAA has to say about it. Why? Because it's the artists mouths I'm supposedly taking food out of and they tell me it's ok to trade their music.
Isn't it pretty funny the RIAA and MPAA have taken different stands on the same issue? The MPAA wants us to now believe that movie trading (I refuse to ever believe it's Piracy unless someone is using their free copy to turn a profit) takes the food out of the mouths of the families of the crew off camera and nothing to do with the artist (the actor)? What about in the recording industry, why aren't they talking about the lonely man that minds over the CD printers or the mixers? No, the RIAA wants us to believe it's the artist we're starving. The only point I find that the MPAA making in their new ad campaign is that they're now showing that they're
afraid the people behind the camera are losing money, namely the big suits who turn the profits the most. Face it, a lighting guy and a prop guy get paid for their jobs, not in royalties. And until I see a theatre not packed on opening day for a movie that should be a blockbuster, I won't care about my movie trading habits either.
File traders are the draft card burners of this generation. Civil Disobedience, jump on the bandwagon with us. Write to your senator, to your representative, to the justices in your area. A cultural revolution has begun and we can not lay down peacefully for the fight.
If I was a stockholder in one of the record labels, I'd be pretty angry by now. I don't know what they're smoking, because there is no way this can hope to save their revenue stream. About the only effect I can see is to make *millions* of their core customers resolve not to spend any money on their products again.
During Prohibition, demand *increased*. People didn't say, "Oh, well, alcohol is illegal again, I guess the Christian Temperance Movement was right. I'll switch to tea." People started bringing alcohol across the Canadian border any way they could, *because most people still wanted alcohol*. If anything, their desire for it was even more keenly felt once it was harder to acquire.
While it makes me sad that everyone is so obviouslly addicted to this (awful) music, I have no doubt the same phenomenon will apply here. Instead of the present situation, I think trading will fragment into several areas:
- Encrypted, anonymous trading. It has some technical challenges and will involve a long development cycle, but experiments like Freenet demonstrate that it is certainly possible.
- LAN trading.
- "Sneakernet" trading (you can move a lot of MP3's with a 20GB MP3 player).
- Waste-like private encrypted networks (and God help the person who breaks into one to look for file trading if there is none actually taking place--it's clearly a Federal offense).
I'm sure there are other methods I haven't thought of. The point is, there's a lot of technology out there now, and I have bo doubt that people angered by the music industry's actions will turn to that technology before spending another dime at the music store ("not one penny in tribute" and such). Like I said, if I was a stockholder I'd probably dump it right quick, because this looks to me like winning the battle but losing the war.
Dave Mathews Band allows live taping, so one could easily be sharing LEGAL bootleg recordings...me for example...and be brought in for illegal sharing?! Blah