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Telcos Stand Against RIAA
john82 writes "In an interesting and insightful article, NetworkWorld Fusion discusses how lawyers for SBC and Verizon are fighting the RIAA's attempts to monitor their customers. As we've heard before, RIAA wants the telcos to report when users download any copyrighted material. Lawyers for SBC and Verizon are fighting back. They also claim that the RIAA is trying to grant themselves powers that are outside of even the Patriot Act. Now where have heard that before? NWFusion also points out that RIAAs handwaving, threats, tantrums have less to do with protecting the rights of musicians, than with protecting the revenue stream created by an out-of-date distribution system." In other RIAA news, taped2thedesk writes "According to the Washington Post and Ars Technica, the RIAA will now contact P2P users before suing them." The RIAA's not so bad, they'll settle out of court over the phone, if you don't mind paying up instead of getting a lawyer.
Speaking of the RIAA, as far as one crime that is known to have been comitted, where the hell are our settlement checks from their price fixing? These things were supposedly to come out this summer, but it's fall already and I sure have not received mine, even though I bought the last albums I'll ever buy in the proper time period and filed the claim in time.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This is, after all, the same Verizon that spent who knows how much in legal fees fighting the RIAA's right to subpoena information on their customers at all. So if it's a cost issue, it's enlightened self-interest: They believe that customers choose them for the value-added of privacy. I don't think their decisions make economic sense on only that basis. Love 'em or hate 'em, I think they're operating out of pride: We're the phone companies, and any hacker, phreaker, or record label trade group who crosses us is going down. But once again I could be wrong.
I, for one, have not bought a single CD since I lost my slow preview of music called Kazaa via dialup. Now that I have no clue what songs are good and what songs suck I refuse to give them my $$ at Wal Mart for the CDs. Yeah you can assume all you want about previewing over radio but I can't pick up a single station where I live. They've lost over 6 months of purchases when I averaged over 50 cd's a year before. If only there were more like me.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
So why is it that the telcos keep getting nailed and we dont hear anything about Comcast...
I guess people with Cable modems dont share files.
Man, I work for Verizon, and they really don't have the ability to do this from my vantage point. Most of the systems we use are still Telnet based. I still fix accounts on a daily basis that haven't been touched since they were first transferred over to the system in 1990 (that's usually the only time there's a major problem with the records, when the data switches databases). They'd probably have to build a whole new system from scratch in order to comply with RIAA's wishes. Of course, I only deal with the business office lines, but most other departments use the same system I use.
Creator of the popular web game Proximity
...that they *know* they can't stop it. Encrypted services will pop up, people will use them and stuff will flow. And then the ISPs gets blamed for the mess "You were supposed to stop them, but you didn't". No, I think part of it is that RIAA made the bed, and now they get to sleep in it, the ISPs sure don't want to take their place.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You don't understand. It isn't outmoded for the record companies. It's outmoded for me as a musician.
Professional recording equipment and expertise is cheaper now than every before in history. I can record an album in a studio for what I can save up on a minimum wage job. If I have some expertise myself I can do it myself at home for "free," at higher quality than even the pros could do it 20 years ago.
I can produce CD-Rs on my own or have CDs pressed for pennies apiece, including jewel case and inserts.
I have no need of a record company's money to finance my album.
As such I don't have to buy my own CDs back from them at full wholesale in order to distribute them as demos or for sales either. In fact, I don't have to distribute CDs as demos at all. Instead of spending $20k to mail out a few thousand demo CDs I can now upload many times that many for free direct to whomever I wish to hear them without the need of a go between.
I can make sure my website address is attached to those demos. At my website I have worldwide promotional capabilities, including making cuts available for free download as a promotional giveaway, and, of course, album sales.
Of course my website will be heavily promoting my live appearances as well, where I will be selling CDs for ten bucks and pocketing nine of that in profits.
On sales of no more than a few thousand CDs I make more profit than I would with half a million in sales with a Sony contract.
I grew up in a radio household (my dad was sales and marketing development manager for GE Broadcasting Corp.) and been a working musician for for three decades. Half of my friends have recorded, some of them for labels. Most of those that have recorded for a label now do so as private publishers.
This isn't "Pie in the Sky." It's the way many are already doing business, and it's already proven to work.
I can't imagine signing with a label. They have nothing to offer me that I can't provide for myself, at my own profit.
KFG
Why do everyone hate the telcos?
I've never had bad phone service. It's always worked. Even when the power goes out, I can pick up a hard-wired phone and get dialtone. I've never had a problem with clarity of my phone connections -- they are always crystal clear. I've never had a call fail because of bandwidth unavailability. The service has a reasonable cost, and their bean counters will usually let you get a month in arrears before they cut you off. I've used two different cable companies and two different telephone companies for broadband, and DSL beat out cable modem both times. The DSL connections are more reliable, both in continuous connection times and in steady bandwidth availability. The telephone companies will market to those who want to run services through their pipe and even make blocks of static IP addresses available, while the cable companies dole out static IPs stingily and charge three times as much.
So, in a nutshell, telcos produce a superior quality service that does what it's supposed to do virtually all the time and for a good price. What is to hate?
It's easy to hate Microsoft because of their ridiculous EULAs, overpriced software, and hard-on for Digital Restrictions Management. It's easy to hate the RIAA for wanting to bankrupt people already near the poverty line and for refusing to admit that just maybe they are putting out lower quality product at higher prices in a sluggish economy and that just maybe their failure to adapt to new technology might be a straw woven into the handbasket that is taking their business to Hell.
So what have the telocs done to earn such ire?
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
They should have asked that the DMCA be declared invalid.
yo.
Why do everyone hate the telcos?
I'll tell you why I hate the telcos:
1) The service is absurdly overpriced for what you get. I can go to fry's a pick up a commodity 100mbps switch for less than $10 per port, but can I get decent data service to my house for less than $60/mo? No.
2) Yes my basic phone service is quite reliable and I can always dial 911. That's because the California PUC requires it, and there are very stiff penalties for failing to deliver this minimal level of service. But what if I want to block telemarketers? What if I want reliable data service? What if I want a phone bill I can understand? What if I want to be able to call a support rep who can help? There are no fines for failing to provide these things, and as a government-imposed monopoly providing an essential service, they have no reason to improve service in these areas.
Communications technology has improved enormously in the last 20 years. But is SBC spending my $80/mo rolling trucks to pull fiber and install high-speed switches in neighborhoods? No, they're out repairing ancient 100-pair copper cables using outdated tools and labor imported from Canada because all their experienced techs have quit due to getting fucked on pay and retirement benefits even during the telecom boom.
What about data services for my business? Why should a meager 1.5Mbps in each direction, used occasionally, cost more almost ten times what the average home user pays to fill the pipe with pr0n and mp3s?
And a final bit of context: I used to own an ISP during the late 90's. Sold it for a pretty penny, but it was a money-losing business and a pain in the ass to run. The biggest impediment to my success was the fucking phone companies. I'm paying $1K per month for each of a dozen T1 lines, but can I get a knowledgeable person on the phone to help me troubleshoot a line problem? No. Can I get a tech out on 1 hrs notice when my service goes down, no. That wasn't the worst of it either. When DSL became available, I had to pay Covad to pay PacBell to get service to my customer, while PacBell was allowed to offer the service in direct competition at a lower price than my own cost just to get a line out the customer. Fuck the phone companies. I am so glad that my livelihood does not depend on their services any more.
As if the ISPs could even manage real-time content scanning on a reasonable sized pipe.
But seriously folks, the moment ISPs might actually start trying such an exercise -- after being dragged kicking and screaming into it -- does anyone doubt that every P2P would start employing public key strong encryption (e.g. AES) on file transfers?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Does Verizon charge the RIAA for each name? Doesn't the DMCA state that the ISP can charge a reasonable fee for it? Why doesn't Verizon just charge large fees to the RIAA?