Slashdot Mirror
RIAA Threatens More Music-Lovers
Xenographic writes "According to this article at SFGate, the RIAA has warned 204 more people that they are pursuing legal action against them. After the uproar over the last batch of lawsuits, however, they're not (yet) suing the people in question, but intend to allow them to settle out of court, first."
Downhillbattle.org, a music activism site, has set up a defense fund to help those who have been sued pay their legal bills. Slashdotters are always saying that more people should fight the suits, help out those who are.
Cut off their revenue stream by listening to bands that they don't own! You know, bands that would love for you to download their music.
There must be some other way to handle this situation. I know that I was one of those crying "foul play" when the RIAA started (or was rumoured to have started) sabotaging various peer-to-peer services with faked files. But looking back I must admit that that was a rather cool tactic to use. They entered the game and adapted to the existing rules and exploited them. The coolness stopped there, however.
Lawsuits are, in circumstances like these and my opinion, the unfair way out. Using a measure that is not available to both sides. More or less exploiting the legal service because you cannot (or don't want to) compete in any other way. And don't let me get started on copy-protection. Hardly anything has pissed me off as much as when I bought a CD that I couldn't rip and put on my mp3 player. Incidentally that was the last CD I bough. I remember seeing a discussion featuring Chuck D. and Lars Ulrich at the height of the Metallica/Napster controversy. Ulrich's favourite word was "control". And that is the way it is, huh? It's all about control where it should be about respect.
Fans don't agree with the way things are going anymore. Instead of adapting to their wishes you decide to sue them. That is what living in a free country with a free market is all about. The need to adapt is gone when you have the courts on your side.
Hank! White!
204? That number sounds familiar...how many people signed those amnesty forms a while back?
A) Laws aren't made in heaven.
B) If everyone thought like you do, we would still have seperate-but-equal, India would still be under British control, and abortion would be illegal everywhere.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Say rather than the RIAA is within their rights, not justified.
Claiming they are justified because there's a law that allows them to do so it merely an appeal to authority and specious.
I wont mince words; although, like others, I welcome an acceptable middle ground, I reject the notion that the RIAA has an absolute right to resort to any tactic to prevent themselves being put out of business.
>It is only illegal to upload copyrighted songs.
If only it were so black and white. If you were correct, it would not be possible for something like sourceforge to exist. It is only illegal to upload copyrighted works if the owner of those rights has not given permission.
Just because someone owns a copyright, does not automatically make it illegal to copy or distribute that work, but it does put the control of that decision in the hands of the holder of the copyright.
My music is copyright, but I'd consider it perfectly ok for it to be distributed however and by whomever would be interested. When the RIAA folks swing their fist, they hit my nose: I do not want to be forced to take some action just to make it OK to distribute my works. If the media folks get their way, it will be that much harder for the person whose work isn't worth much to anyone besides himself. God forbid if I had to pay a fee or register with the State or something, just to make it okay for people to maybe listen to my music. The RIAA would like it that way -- to redefine copyright in a way that everything not expressly permitted is forbidden and severely punishable.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Actually mob rule is the basis of law in america. It just happens to be based on the christian mob. Since we all live in a country that is run by christians it's not considered mob rule, it's just the way it should be. There is a reason things like sodomy, adultery, abortion, and many other non-christian behaviors were (and some still are) illegal for so long. For some reason forcing women to wear cloth from head to toe in a muslim society is backward and wrong but sticking a man in jail for sodomy in texas is the good christian thing to do. The one constant in society is mans intolerance for people not like him. Get enough like minded people together and it stops being wrong and starts being 'just the way it is'.
You want an answer to the piracy problem: Meet half way. It's obvious people want more choices than the century old album, and it's just as obvious that the record companies want to keep their iron fist wrapped around peoples musical outlets as well as their wallets. Neither side is totaly right or wrong. In fact, I'd say both sides are just as stubborn and closed minded. There is some common ground.
Perhaps If you were to read the artical and familiarize yourself with the past behavior of the RIAA (instead of spouting as much rubbish as you can and still have a shot at first post), you might understand that the reason this so pisses alot of us off is exactly because we are music lovers. The issue is not necessarily one of piracy, nor lawsuits, but one of a blatent monopoly acting in their own interests and screwing their audence
Case in point:
"Our objective here is not to win lawsuits; it is to foster a business environment where legal online music services and bricks-and-mortar retail stores can flourish.''
That might be true, but five years ago this was anything but the case. The RIAA in the past not only has done nothing to promote MP3s or any other "free" type of file (free as in containing no or few restrictions on use), but rather went out of their way to denounce the mp3 as a tool whose use was limited to piracy, and sunk money into proprietary, loosy formats which were time, play, or copy limited. They missed the uprising of online music by blatently persecuting those involved in it, legally or otherwise, and as such have had no monitary interest in it until Napster brought mp3s away from campuses and onto the computers of the common man...when they realized that it would not and could not be stopped.
Additionally the RIAA has gone out of its way to manipulate both facts and figures. MP3s are a perfect digital copy they say, and therefore a much different beast then an analog VCR tape. Make sense to me, BUT, they use an argument that directly counters this at other times. Lets say one owns a CD and wants to make MP3's...its legal. Wants to find MP3's (corresponding to the CD in question) online...nope, the RIAA says that each CD pressed has minute flaws unique to a given CD and therefore the MP3's I create and those created by somone else are different entities, in effect that the MP3 is not so perfect a digital copy. Quite frankly I see little point in reporter even asking questions that demonstrate inconsistancies such as this (if you cannot afford a $15 cdrom drive or cannot figure out how to use one of the many available ripping tools then by definition your much too stupid to be finding music online). The point here is not that its a viable situation, rather that the RIAA tends to interpret law, or figures, in the way which is most convient at the time.
Take this one:
The lawsuits are the record industry's reaction to a 31 percent decline in CD sales in the United States in the past three years, a sharp drop that coincides with the rise of popular file-sharing networks like Kazaa and Gnutella, used by millions of people around the world to swap free copies of songs.
What is ommited is this period also coincides with an economic slump and lossed by companies accross the board. It also coincides with the price of DVDs, a digital copy of a movie which took say $100 million to produce, falling below $10, and that of compact discs, which take perhaps $50,000 to master rising above $20. It also coincides with behaviors from the RIAA that have caused a handful, such as myself, to cease buying CD's. So while its nice to throw a big figure out there and omit all the other stuff, even nicer is to analize that figure in a historical perspective.
To me a music lover is someone that buys a nice set of speakers, and listens to music. In contrast to this is those such as yourself who like to support the RIAA by giving the Spice Girls and N-Sync there day in the spotlight and dollar per disk, and could care less that the other $19 is used for suing 12 year olds and other worthless causes that do nothing to further music
How do I keep track of people who are fingering