RIAA Bits

HardYakka writes "The New York Times writes that record industry executives who are adamant that file sharing is stealing are not above stealing themselves." The NYT also has two other stories on file-sharing today: one with emphasis on musicians, and an opinion piece about the internet. Also floating around: this humor piece and an EFF petition.

Comments

Stealing by the RIAA

[AtariAmarok]

The news these days is filled with stories of stealing by the RIAA.

What else can you call people being forced to give money to the RIAA through the use of threats?

The Legal Process

[AtariAmarok]

Here's a bit from a song "Pretty Boy Floyd" which says it all about abuse of the "legal process":

"Now as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen."

RIAA Detention Centers

[TrollBurger]

Hey, the humour piece on the RIAA detention centers was pretty funny, but its really not that far from the truth. For over a decade and a half now the US government has been setting up and maintaining fully operational detention centers all throughout america.

There were estimates a few years ago that the capacity was over two million. Part of me doesn't want to know what their capacity is currently.

The camps were set up as a part of operation Rex84 (search) in the 80s, established on the reasoning that if a mass exodus of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA.

Now that the Patriot Act and Patriot Act II move to establish anyone that breaks any law as a potential terrorist, it makes you wonder what they've got planned...

There's a lot of info on the net about these and other operations. A lot of the websites play the 'paranoid' card a little too strongly (*cough* alex jones*cough*), but I highly recommended you check out available info!

Some links:

http://www.apfn.org/apfn/camps.htm
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/camps.html
http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/concentration.htm
http://www.c0balt.com/egg/insane.shtml

I'm not trolling, this is some serious shit, America!

Extortion [Re:Stealing by the RIAA]

[Sphere1952]

Just to be technical.

Stealing is taking by stealth. Robbery is taking by force. Extortion is taking by threat (Illegal use of one's official position or powers to obtain property, funds, or patronage).

Re:Welcome To The New World, Geek Fewl...

[SmallFurryCreature]

Really? Ancient business models failing? You mean the one where I produce something for a certain cost and then I sell it for cost + profit? I could swear most of us take part in that model at least once a week. Well at least those I presume are capable of typing. It is called shopping.

Of course this ancient and still going strong model is based on a certain principle. Namely that is a substantial part of the cost of the item being sold is the production of the item itself. So that producing X times the number of items will incur X times the cost or at least close to that. Although cost per unit tends to go down as the number of units goes up this is not a steep curve nor for that matter an infinite one no matter how the charts look. If it was then at a certain number of units the cost of production would fall to zero. Perhaps even go negative :)

What is outdated is the idea that this model applies to all things being sold. The technologies that made the internet possible have allowed some of the basics behind the cost of producing items to be changed. If it costs me X to produce a digital product then it doesn't cost me X*number of items. The cost of material and production capacity that ensures the rather smooth curve in the normal world is gone. Really the only thing keep the cost from being zero is the cost of distribution wich are low for digitals products.

Producing a billion or a thousand digital items makes no difference. This is new. Also new is that distribution costs are pretty much equel no matter the distence. I now have a truly worldwide audience. Compare this to the rather limited distance a product like say milk goes.

So for digital products a number of changes have occured.

• Cost of production of a single item is pretty close to production of an infinite number of items. This is because we can make an excact copie of it without loss at neglible costs.
• Cost of storage has plummted. Where in the normal world I have to store every item made a digital product needs to store only 1 item, the original. www.kernel.org holds only 1 copy of a kernel at a time. Not one for everyone who uses linux.
• Related to the above, no cost for unsold copies. Every copy made is "sold".
• Neglible transportation cost. Try sending a letter to the other side of the world. It will cost easily as much as the material itself. Now send an email. Further more the costs don't increase with distance (well not so you notice, again try sending an email)

there are lots of other differences but I think these alone make for the fact that we now can have a different business model. And that is the problem. Not that the old model is obsolete. It still works fine for products that are produced in the old way, no negative meaning being applied to old btw. What the record companies and for that matter most content suppliers have failed to realize that theyre products can use a new business method.

The silly thing is that music sharing is profitable for quite a number of companies. These are called ISP's and the telecoms. They make a bundle out of programs like napster. Or do you really need DSL/t3 to send email?

I for one am still waiting for the following. Every "record" store gets a computer with a couple of outlet points (cd burners firewire connections and such), some terminals, a big HD array say 1 terrabyte (very cheap if you use IDE, it doesn't have to be fast) and a connection to a central network (doesn't have to be the internet for security).

Then all that is needed is for every music owner to catalog their music and make it available on the central network.

I then browse the catalog in the shop and make my selections. Popular songs are already locally available while others are taking from the network, perhaps stored in a cache, and my selection is then burned or put on an mp3 player etc. I then pay the shopkeeper the fee.

Seems a simple enough solution. The shop has every piece of music ever sold on a wide va

Can we use the law against them and sue them?

[iconnor]

If they are happy to download the music to see if it belongs to them, consider the mistake if it did not.
If someone has a name similar to that of their artist (or not), records some copyright material to mp3 and then puts it on the network. The condition is it is free for anyone to download, except the major record labels, their employees, agents, contractors or affiliates. By virtue of their copyright laws, they are not allowed to download it (aka steal it) and are subject to $1500 or $150,000 fine if they do.

All we need to do then is monitor the downloads of this mp3, and then sue the RIAA when they download it. If there is more than 216 of us doing this, then we can easily outweigh their laws and settle this similar to how the large companies settle patent lawsuits, you lower your weapons and we lower ours.