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RIAA Sequentially Repeating Edison's Mistakes?
An anonymous reader writes "George Ziemann has written the latest installment in his 'history repeats itself' series of articles regarding the record industry and the tactics utilized by their lobby, the RIAA. This time Ziemann focuses on the recent RIAA lawsuits against individuals who file-trade, and the search-and-seize missions against independent music stores. Slashdot posted his first two articles back in June."
The RIAA has finally learned to evolve and change their buisness model, just like SCO.
Instead of selling goods and services, they're litigating themselves afloat.
Banaaaana!
Then they'll eventually go away and, unlike Edison, won't be remembered for actually inventing anything. After all, I look around the room, and much of what I see, Edison had a hand in shaping. What has the RIAA had a hand in? What is their redeeming quality? Britney Spears and boy bands? Edison invented modern invention, among other things; thus I can forgive his lack of business tact.
I know this has been said over and over but the RIAA never adapted in time to the internet. They will be lucky to catch up now and stop losing revenues. P2P is the new store, just like businesses that cut costs by using e-store's instead of real store fronts. The more people the RIAA sues, the farther underground P2P will go, products like Freenet, Bit torrent and other programs will become common place and they will never find them all. What's the point in pissing off your customer base if your trying to make money. All they are doing is flogging a dead horse.
On the one hand you have Edison, a generally gregarious fellow who worked hard and built a company full of smart folks and is remembered as one of the fathers of invention. He was probably a little overboard taking credit where credit wasn't due, but as the CEO you get to do that.
On the other hand you have Tesla, a genius in every respect of the word. Smart, talented, able to make leaps of intuition where others (including Edison) muddled, and able to cause an uproar with his outrageous comments and frequently backed up his statements with serious science. He was a geek, IOW.
One died rich and went down in history as a great inventor. The other died poor and in poor standing with the scientific community and is generally regarded as a kook.
You can't seriously say that Edison was the one who made the mistakes.
In the exact same time frame, Automobile manufacturers had an association based on the patent for a self propelled vehicle with an internal combustion engineering. The patent was owned by a lawyer who formed an association regulating who could make cars. If you weren't a member of of the association you got sued to oblivion for manufacturing automobiles.
Funny thing is a guy name Henry Ford came along wanted to make a car that was much cheaper than what the association thought was reasonable. The association reacted predicatbly, sued ford motor. When their lawsuit against Ford didn't progress as rapidly as they would have liked they started suing people buying or driving a ford. This was their mistake. While coniderably more legitimate than SCO's threat to sue users, it had much the same effect. A PR nightmare. The general public doesn't have patents, or get to play the IP game. They do however buy things, and suing people for buying things was not a great PR move back then
Needless to say most people know who Henry Ford was, not many can name the owner or members of the patent association.
The same thing also occured in Radio.
You have to deal with the real world and the people who live in it. Wal-mart can leave bags of mulch unattended on palettes in front of the store because it's usually not really worth ripping them off. Liquor stores never leave their whiskey sitting out in front of the store, even though people *shouldn't* steal it if it were left unattended. The Internet has just changed music from a mulch-like product to a whiskey-like product.
In case you haven't thought this through, when you download a song off a P 2 P network NOBODY makes any money directly. Not the artist not the record label not the RIAA (Artists may get some marginal benifit from having there music "out there". Please see ll cool Js senate testomony about this.. .
The world has never had such a quick and easy way to produce copies before. This is new.. This is not someone in the basement making bootlegs one at a time on a crappy cassette player and selling them at college fairs.
One wonders why law enforcement isn't looking into piracy more and the RIAA has to defend itself.
If artists want to put there music out there for everyone to copy for free they wouldn't sign music deals, they'd set up web sight. Many do give music away for free!. Go to a show, SUPPORT BANDS YOU LIKE so they don't end up flipping burgers.
The RIAA's business model is to set the price of its goods higher than the market can bear. If GE went around selling lightbulbs for $80, people would get their bulbs elsewhere.
Granted, the situation isn't exactly the same, but the point is that if CDs were cheaper, people would be more inclined to buy them. We all know that CDs cost less than a dollar to manufacture and that the artist gets only a small share of the profit, so why should prices be so high? The industry has a monopoly that it is abusing, so a black market appears. It is the kind of situation that defeats capitalism and it should be corrected.
Actually, this is a prime example of grass roots capitalism at its finest. People are abandoning a high priced source of a product in droves, and switching to a much lower priced source for the same product (legal niceties bedamned).
The market is speaking, and whether or not the RIAA listens makes not the least whit of difference.
Is it fascism yet?
That's what made him obscenely rich. The movie industry was only a small part of his enterprise. That it became an even smaller part of it was, yes, because of the mistakes he made in trying to assure himself of a monopoly.
And the brethren went away edified.
"...They came without a notice - no warrant, no nothing. They're making up their own laws, if you ask me."
ok, so if they didnt have a warrant, why didnt you just tell them to get the hell out of your store?
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
You lose the moral high ground by pirating music instead of simply doing without it.
No one is forcing you to own music from RIAA-affiliated labels.
There is also no legal guarantee of being able to purchase media in the format you want it in. The "I'm only using illegal file sharing because major labels don't sell music online!" argument is like saying that if there's a movie I want that's only available on DVD and I prefer VHS, that it's somehow okay for me to copy an old tape from the library instead of either doing without it or buying the DVD version.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
RIAA: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." N.B.: This is a paraphrase from the ancient Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita.
The land of the free? Not anymore it would seem. The American Dream: July 4th 1776 - September 11th 2001, RIP.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Ahh, I see. So you want to ship your money to some anonymous, probably mostly off-shore run mega warehouse online and save $2 a CD.
Or, you could spend a few bucks more, shop your local market, keep some jobs there, get GREAT service, know who you are buying from, be remembered by name by both the staff and management.
When you see how many people I have coming to my store every day, begging for a job, and I have to tell them to go get a job where they buy their CDs (mostly the Internet or the mega stores), they slowly start to realize that saving $2 but not getting the service and stability they desire isn't all that grand.
Yes, and that's even a comment you won't normally hear from a libertarian, as everyone thinks we're pro-huge corporation and pro-Internet. I believe they have a constitutional right to exist, but I'd rather support my local shops, even at a 20% surcharge, if it means I'll get better service and keep the money local.