Slashdot Mirror
RIAA Extends Legal Action
shystershep writes "An article at InfoWorld tells how the RIAA 'is filing 41 new lawsuits and sending 90 lawsuit-notification letters this week, adding to the 341 lawsuits filed and 308 notification letters sent since September. The RIAA has settled with 220 file-sharers as a result of lawsuits, lawsuit-notification letters and subpoenas. In addition, 1,054 users have submitted affidavits as part of the RIAA's amnesty program.' The RIAA also claims that its tactics are actually working -- to increase awareness and reduce online piracy."
... this is what their records and statistics may claim. And as we all know the RIAA is a bastion of honesty, forthrightness and righteousness.
The number of people on the big file-sharing networks is half of what it was before the law suits. But as kazaa declines, edonkey and bittorrent grow. If they're stated goal is to destroy kazaa, then mission accomplished. But if they want to stop file sharing, they'll have to destroy the internet.
Rather than your point, which is that the RIAA's legal actions may be driving people to buying digitial music, couldn't you also argue that the decrease in p2p activity is due to people finally having access to a number of viable, legitimate, cheap online music outlets?
I'm sure the number of people who stopped pirating music because they could sample it and buy it for cheap on iTunes is pretty significant.
I agree that the lawsuit's are stupid on the part of the RIAA, but why is suing a 12 year old file swapper any worse than suing a 32 year old geek who lives in his parents basement?
Because the purpose of the lawsuits are a public relations war, and every time they fuck up (sue a 12 year old, sue a Mac-owning granny) they shoot themselves in the foot.
Also because they are trying to change the term "piracy" to mean "sharing copyrighted material without paying the piper" away from its original meaning of publishing copyrighted material without a license. Funny, folks don't seem to cotton to equating a 12-year old downloading tracks with a criminal bootleg operation.
The industry fucked up by not taking Napster and using it as a conduit for regular sales.
I know too many people who love good music to risk buying crap at the store that they haven't gotten a proper chance to preview, but let's leave behind the idea that many people treated the MP3s they downloaded as the equivalent of ads when it came to determining what CDs they wanted to buy.
Think on this instead. You're already on Napster, downloading music. You've just found out that you can also buy concert tickets there. Or, there's a neat service that, for 5 bucks, will dump a huge selection of thematically-related songs onto your computer in a conveniently located spot for burning to a CD. Or, there's a spot for getting T-shirts, posters, sweaters, stickers of your favourite band. Or, there's a spot for buying 50c's autobiography or that Rolling Stones concert on DVD. Or, there's a spot that lets you buy the CDs themselves, since sometimes people want the jackets and lyrics and higher-quality music.
Never mind the ad revenue that could be generated by having such a flourishing community that you're at the center of and controlling.
Feel free to add to this list. On top of it all, you put yourself in a situation where you're working with technology, not against it, and you've got GOODWILL going with your customers.
Imagine that.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Between my coworkers and I, we have enough music to last us the rest of the decade."
You may want to reclassify them as "friends" rather than "coworkers" -- you might find that your employer is not inclined to remain your friend if ever confronted with this issue...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Actually, I think the message is now "just share with people you can trust, not the whole world".
This is so true. I now have an extra 80 gig hard drive nearly filled with MP3 music that I freely share with my co-workers.
I'll often go to the library and just grab 30 CDs off the shelf, bring them home, and rip them into MP3 (while getting the song titles from CDDB). All lot of titles I haven't heard even once and about 2/3rds I just erase {the '1000 Accordians Play The Beatles' wasn't as good as I thought it would be). But, there's lots of incredible World Music that I would have never known existed without using this method.
In a few years the RIAA will get its wish and people will stop trading MP3 files over the net. They will instead trade 100 gigabyte hard drives each filled with 2000 albums in 192kbps MP3 format with full titles and scanned cover art. With blank 4.7gig DVD disks hovering around $1 each and DVD burners nearing $100 (and sure to be increasing in quality), people will just trade whole genre collections on hard disk and copy the albums they like onto cheap DVDs.
But that's not the real issue. Eventually people will get bored with non-interactive 20th century music frozen into song units and start exploring ways to customize pre-recorded music.
The music industry will be the last to realize that people will actually pay money (some money at least) for music that they can remix at home and change the instrumentation, vocals, levels, and so other parameters. Something like you can do now with General MIDI files and classical music instrument synthesizers.