Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.