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.

Comments

That's not that interesting...

[Frac]

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!"

A pattern emerging?

[BalaClavaChord]

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!

Re:silver lining

[duck 'o death]

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.

helpful?

[thanjee]

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!

Isn't it obvious?

[itistoday]

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 ;-)

Most interesting song

[mrvis]

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?

I'm really quite amazed

[under_score]

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.

Kudos to the slashdot readers!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

RIAA is in violation of kazaa license!

[levk]

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."

It is the other way around or "A Plan for RIAA"

[Pac]

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.

Re:Only on slashdot...

[babbage]

Yes they weren't thoughtful enough to put in plain text so I can run your Perl scripts on it.

Simple solution: Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple .

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):

#!/path/to/perl -w

use strict;
use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple;
use LWP::Simple;

my $content = get("http://www.slyck.com/misc/p2p.xls");
open my $fh_excel, "p2p.xls" or die "cant write: $!";
print $fh_excel $content;

my $xls = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple->read('p2p.xls');
foreach my $sheet ($xls->sheets) {

while ($sheet->has_data) {

my @data = $sheet->next_row;
print $data[0], "\t", join("\t", split (/ */, $data[1]));

}

}

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... :-)

Re:silver lining

[Publicus]

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.

RIAA signed artists don't own their music!

[dido]

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.