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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."
A lot of people used Napster, before it was shut down. There was sentiment against file swapping for a short while, but then Kazaa, Morpheus, and others stepped in, and file swapping increased.
After the RIAA sues a few thousand people, and the tide turns against swapping, it will slow again.
But the fact of the matter is that the RIAA members need to come up with a new business model. File sharing will always be around in some fashion, and the technology will just get more and more complex - making it easier to do truely anonymous swapping.
It's been said a million times on here already - the RIAA is just like SCO - they need to adopt a new business model if they're going to survive. Litigation alone won't support them forever.
The linux hacker
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.
RIAA Sequentially Repeating Edison's Mistakes?
A statement like that puts an unfair association on Edison. It's like comparing apples to dog crap.
I moderate "-1, Fool"
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.
Interesting article, but I wonder why he left out the most interesting of Edison's anticompetitive actions. In Hollywood, it is legendary how Edison hired assassins to shoot his competitors movie cameras when they worked on location. He could have drawn a comparison to Orrin Hatch's proposal to make computers self-destruct when playing pirated tunes.
And I hate the Yankees for this exact reason.
RIAA Sequentially Repeating Edison's 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.
Well, if the RIAA is repeating what Edison did, eventually we'll start putting criminals to death by playing some recent CDs at them until they die.
(link)
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I understand the parallels that were made between the two, but I find the discussion a bit skewed. Edison was one who had the interest of people in his mind. The reason he had the money is because he gave the people what they wanted. He helped found an electric company that gave power to houses. He invented items that have become household standards. We owe a great deal of thanks to Edison. MPAA, on the other hand, cares about nothing but profits and ways to maximize profits. Time has allowed America to become a country that can ignore the desires of the common people while searching for more profits. Such a schema would never have worked in Edison's day.
A little learning never hurt anyone.
The RIAA screws the artists.
They steal their songs, they pay them a tiny fraction of what they make from them, and they exercise creative control through the use of unfair contracts.
The RIAA screws the retailers.
This is self evident, but in case you're not observant, the CD costs the record store around 85% as much as they sell it for. They dump products on the market in the forms of "deals" in order to bump up CD sales and manipulate music charts.
The RIAA screws the public.
We buy overpriced CDs for which we have no actual legal rights. Another industry would have been hit for price fixing, but since technically the RIAA isn't a company, they technically aren't a monopoly. We get treated like criminals for violating the monopoly they technically don't have.
And we're ripping THEM off? God forbid the world evolves and this 19th century shit they're trying to pull doesn't fly anymore. 110 years ago you'd have been trying to stop Ford from building his first car, so as not to put the horse people out of business.
What's happening right now is a direct result of their exploitive business practices. People are done whining about it, and they're making their displeasure felt in the only way that counts. Now the whiners are on the other side of the fence, and we're happy to tell you all the same thing you told us: Deal with it, because there's not a fucking thing you can do about it.
Just my opinion.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I own an independent record store, my margins are in the vicinity of 100%, and I've been increasing my product line by nearly double every 2-3 weeks just by buying two CDs for every one I sell.
Of course, I don't sell Sting or Britney Spears or any of that garbage. I send those customers to Circuit City or Borders.
I move product that you can't find in stores, and you can't even get easily on the Internet. My two big Internet competitors are Interpunk and Angry, Young, and Poor. They sell the CDs for $12-$13. I sell them for $15. We both buy them for $6-$8.
I also sell T-shirts, punk pins, patches, and hats. About a 100% margin there. I move music the same way the big labels do: I play a new CD over and over and over again in my store. I carry peripheral items as well, to attract a crowd. I offer compensation for customers who bring in their friends.
I sponsor events at local shows with local bands, and sell my merch there. I give a percentage to the local band, usually more than what the venue offers them for playing. I sell the bands' music directly on consignment, and keep just 15-20%.
And guess what? I make a profit. A pretty good one. Sure, you never heard of 99% of the bands, but does it matter when I am turning over my inventory every 45-90 days? I don't sit on a CD for more than 90 days, and if I do, I move it at cost and replace it with a different one.
Let the big guys control the big bands -- there's no profit in those guys for an independent store like me. I don't have any MP3s in the store. I don't have any CD-Rs. I don't even have a CD-Recorder in my PC at the store. I block Kazaa and other apps so my employees can't get me trapped.
This is a huge conspiracy that the RIAA is walking all over guys like me -- they're not. I find a market and I dominate it and I make money.
Would I make more if I sold Sting and Bush and Avril Lavigne? Maybe. But then I'd have to work by their rules, and I won't. So I accept the fact that I can't make 7 figures a year, but I'm on track to make 6. And if I open a few more stores (with great customer service, an awesome ability to promote new bands, and a friendly atmosphere that never feels like the mall) I'll only multiply my take.
Face it -- if you think you're in a bind, controlled by a monopoly, you don't realize the big issue: you have choice on what you carry.
I can make a buck. Go try it. You can, too.
Tesla, on the one hand, sucked seriously, but on the other hand, still get tonnes of play on "Classic Rock" stations with "Signs". So they have to still be clocking some pretty good royalty payments, and it'd be irresponsible to call them "poor". Also, 40-something skid radio station programmers still appreciate them, although I fail to see the relevance of their standing with the scientific community.
I saw Tesla open up for Skynard once, and I can confidently that they aren't at all geeks.
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 record industry is doomed because we no longer need any industry to record data (musical or otherwise) thanks to personal computers which even using entirely free software can be better then entire recording studios few years ago. We don't need multi-million-dollar equipment, so there is no point in centralization. RIAA knows that and they are desperately trying to do anything to save their obsolete business model. They can only be safe if there is DRM everywhere and people need a license to publish their work in a way readable with most of the equipment of the future (Palladium/TCPA/etc.). In the past we needed the recording industry becuse they were the only ones who had the equipment. In the future we'll need the recording industry becuse they will be the only ones who will have the encryption keys. Thank god we have FSF, EFF and similar organizations fighting for our freedom because I'm sure as hell I don't want to live in such a future.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Hopefully the RIAA doesnt have any chairs with extra legs to prevent tipping... or a battery operated hammer.
This is what is going on here with KaZaA and other file sharing programs -- there is a model in place that allows for the product to get to the users faster and cheaper, and without the unnecessary middlemen markup that the RIAA imposes on us. The RIAA's problem with this is that it completely breaks their business model, so they do the only possible things they can -- pretend it doesn't exist, and then when that fails, villify those that use it, even for legal purposes.
The RIAA's biggest fear about this is the possibility of the use this distribution method coupled with direct compensation to the artists who create the music. At that point, musicians stop signing with the RIAA companies en masse, and the RIAA companies instantly become obsolete and die off, as happened to Edison's movie industry. In fact, I'm surprised that the RIAA hasn't also lobbied against mastering programs like CakeWalk, since that potentially affects their revenue streams as well if the artists begin to mix and master their own recordings, circumventing the need for RIAA technicians.
The bottom line is that the RIAA member companies will never embrace these technologies because they take out the overwhelming majority of the built-in cost they tag on every recording they produce, and without that cash flow, how are they going to afford their yachts and vacation homes?
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Remember how the RIAA was found guilty of price-fixing on CDs and settled?
This is a direct consequence of the settlement.
The RIAA maintained the effective price-fix by instituting a minimum advertised price rule. Stores could sell CDs for whatever price they wanted, but if the price they were advertising was above a certain threshold, the RIAA would pay for the advertising. This had the effect of keeping Wal-Mart and Best Buy from achieving a near-monopoly position in retailing (and thus being able to dictate to the RIAA in matters of content and pricing). Wal-Mart and Best Buy were planning to sell CDs at cost to lead to increased sales per square foot of the store (and generate foot traffic) and their plans would depend on being able to advertise $9 CDs (from a very limited selection; only the stuff that was new and exceptionally popular would be carried).
In order to prevent the big box retailers from taking over the retail market, the RIAA cut their legs out by giving stores that were willing to charge full price (and take a guaranteed profit) free advertising. This in turn kept the small stores and music specific chains in business.
Then Wal-Mart and Best Buy sued for price-fixing and won. The result since then has been even more more blandness in the recording business; with Wal-Mart and Best Buy accounting for greater and greater shares of the retail market, they will only carry CDs that will sell a lot of copies very quickly. Artists who only go consistently gold are getting pushed out because the retailers aren't interested.
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.
Actually, if I were in their shoes, I would not do the same. I would make my product more attractive to my most profitable demographic: the teenager. The average teenager wants to listen to "kewl" music, to instant message, and to talk to their friends on their new mobile phone.
So make the music CD computer compatible. Embrace the new technology, rather than stifle it. Make the kids want to spend the $15 or whatever it is on a new CD, rather than download the CD from kazaa - make it worth their while to do so. Add value to the tracks.
How do they do this, you ask? Here's a few suggestions:
Rather than trying to "protect our artists' IP", the record companies should be trying to attract the buyers back that they are losing to p2p.
Rather than shipping deliberately broken CDs, they should be shipping CDs that are enhanced not just in name, but in content, so downloading mp3s and a CD cover is not enough to have the whole experience.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I don't think you can sell more product by alienating your customers. You sell more by having a good product at the right price.
"...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"
A music industry exec reads this article, turns to another, and asks "Which step number is 'profit!', again?"
This is happening somewhat in the movie industry. Independent films have been gaining market share. The majors have insulated themselves by distributing the independent films and by the fact that a movie theater needs to fill seats, which leaves the independent film without a large advertising budget or an Oscar nomination without a home.
The only thing the RIAA has is the fact that radio sells records, and they pay Clear Channel enough money to keep independent records off the radio. This is why they attacked internet radio so much. It represents the ultimate loss of control. This is why they don't want to distribute tracks over the internet. Almost no physical costs means the barriers to entry are almost non-existent. They have to do so now because people are just downloading the tracks anyway. It will be interesting to see what the restriction on the internet retailers will be.
Of course the big concert halls will be still be owned by the corporations, and the children with their innate need to fit in will still beg their parents for 50 bucks to see the teen heart throb. OTOH, the kids can be smart. I remember a few years ago when our clear channel station that played music which was only minimally offensive to the suburban parent finally had to admit defeat to the Hip Hop revolution. The kids couldn't bring themselves to change the radio station, but they could certainly pick up the phone and complain that the station was pretty much the only station that would not play 'Stan'.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Edison muscled people and companies with all of his patents, created an empire, and utterly failed. His inventions were extraordinary, but his business practices were unethical and illegal. Shit happened and his dreams for a movie empire died--as he tried harder to squeeze his competition, the more 'star systems' slipped through his fingers.
The RIAA is doing all they know how to do: stop people from using their product without paying them. Every stupid corporation does this; Edison is merely an example.
Everything in this article rehashes the same idea over and over. The RIAA is bad. People who try to dominate and extinguish like Edison and the RIAA are bad. Wow. Big deal. We all know this. Some article.
However, the way the author tries to absolve Edison in order to paint the RIAA in a dimmer light really diluted the message the author was trying to convey. Edison was a business man. In fact, he was a very poor business man. He corrupted, controlled, and muscled people around--he was a gangster with inventions and tried to corral his ideas with piles of money and threats. The RIAA act similarly in their actions to control their cash flow, yet they've invented nothing except a product flow of ooper-dooper profit. Edison is a poor analogy.
And here's another thing, Edison and his TRUST tried to extinguish those who refuse to pay for his equipment and Kodak film. Those people, (a large, ambitious Jewish community), moved far from New York to flee from Edison and his thugs: Hollywood. Eventually Edison's association was exterminated, after trying to decimate those Hollywood "indies" that this article's author likes to reference. These indies moved on and created this thing we like to call the MPAA. And you know.. they're great.
Anyway, blah blah blah.. ooga booga... i could fill up lots of crap and say the the same thing over and over but ive said enough crap all ready.
porp
RIAA stands for RIAA Is An Acronym. ( Can you think of any other good words that start with the letter "A"? I don't suppose that any come to mind at all! )
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
I lived in Athens Ga. a few years ago. Many of the bands had sold more records in Europe and Japan than the U.S. If an artist directly (and digitally) sells 10,000 copies of an album globally for $5 (not unreasonable at all), they are doing better than they would pushing plastic locally or regionally in the U.S.
Sites like Magnatunetake care of bandwidth and billing for a 50% cut. They offer fans the option to buy albums on a sliding scale (pay anywhere from $5-$20. Eight bucks is recommended.) And they leave the artist free to enter into any other contract they choose (they can press their own cds or have a cool label do it.) MP3 and Ogg are available for free. Purchasing the album (i.e. supporting an artist you really enjoy) entitles you to uncompressed .wav or aiff
Weedshare.com also has an interesting idea--they pay fans to distribute music. Unfortunately, they only offer .wmv at the time and they seem open for abuse. Still, how long will it be before musicians establish something like affiliate programs. Maybe if fan sites kick over enough paying customers, they get a little cut of the moola (a la Amazon) At the very least, they could support their music habit.
These are interesting and exciting times. Independent producers are the real winners and video is right around the corner thanks to Apple&friends. Now, if only I could convince my local cable monopoly to just keep their boring channels and instead offer me a 20mbps internet connection ; )
harmonious design
The only problem is that this stuff has already been tried, and I can only conclude that the fact it's not all over the joint is an indication that it didn't help matters greatly.
I particularly remember the cheesy multimedia from the Christmas/Special Edition of Aquas Aquarium ( Jesus, there goes my credibility ), and including concert footage on CD's is likewise not incredibly uncommon ( I think Dreamtheater did this on the Live Scenes from New York disk ). Garbage also included a flash based "remixer" for Androdgyny on the special edition of 2.0
The biggest problem that your proposal ( which is cool, but I suspect unlikely to work ) is that the forms of value-add which are both attractive and cost efficient to provide are also generally susceptible to the electronic duplication that is the rationale for their existance in the first place.
I buy CD's because I want Mark Oliver Everett to keep making them. I don't buy them to shore up the RIAA or Dreamworks. But that's just the way it goes. I certainly would not feel more inclined to buy a CD instead of downloading it just on the grounds of some poster or cereal box trinket. I think a substantial proportion of music buyers might feel the same way too, because whenever I go to a HMV, Virgin or a local store like Spot or Rockinghorse, most of the people doing the buying are 20-50. What kind of a give-away are you going to package with Brahms or The Doors?
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
Similarly with ring-tones - send in a coupon you get with a CD, and the record company emails you a one-use password for a ring-tone for your mobile phone with the tune of one of the songs on the album. It also gets those teenagers onto your mailing list, which means you can send them more "special offers" etc as a reward for "supporting our artists".
As for the 20-50 demographic, I have no ideas on how to get them to buy more CDs, although I will say that I am in that particular (broad) demographic. I went into my local record store the other day with the intention of buying a particular CD, then when I noticed it had the "CD enhanced" logo on it, I bought a book instead. I've tried to find an email address for the particular record company to let them know that I didn't buy the CD because of their practice of crippling the CDs, but can't as yet find one.
The EFF has taken on defense of another alleged filesharer. Here is a snippet:
Los Angeles, California - EFF today announced that it will defend Ross Plank of Playa Del Rey, California, against a wrongly filed complaint, among the 261 copyright infringement lawsuits the recording industry has filed against individuals.
The federal lawsuit filed against Plank in Los Angeles accuses him of making hundreds of Latin songs available using KaZaA filesharing software earlier this summer. Plank does not speak Spanish and does not listen to Latin music. More importantly, his computer did not even have KaZaA installed during the period when the investigation occurred.
More articles on Ross Plank and his 'wrongful accusal' at Wired, The Reg, The Inq, DSP Reports, and p2pnet.net.
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!
The public and the government will actually tolerate a benevolent monopoly for quite some time if no one complains about it. Major league baseball is a perfect example
Not. Major league baseball is an example of an entity that is exempt from the antitrust laws because it has an exemption. A trilogy of Supreme Court cases, beginning with Oliver Wendell Holmes in the twenties have sealed the deal.
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.