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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tantrums have less to do with protecting the rights of musicians, than with protecting the revenue stream created by an out-of-date distribution system."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.
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
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