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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.
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.
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.
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!