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."
The message is now clear: Online piracy has failed!
$8.95/mo web hosting
... this is what their records and statistics may claim. And as we all know the RIAA is a bastion of honesty, forthrightness and righteousness.
If their previous lawsuits are any indication we'll see them suing:
A 4 year old Eskimo girl.
A parapalegic with Tourettes.
97 year old twin sisters who still listen to their tube powered RCA radio.
A man who has been in a coma since 1972.
The Vatican.
That crazy guy outside my office who plays a harmonica.
The estate of J. Edgar Hoover.
Some T-Rex fossils in the NY Museum of Natural History.
Antarctica.
Trolling is a art,
The RIAA are coming for the children!
These are getting seriously out of hand...
Considering the number of filesharing users out there, 1,054 takers on the amnesty program is fairly pitiful, actually. What would be more interesting would be the number of people who have quietly dropped off of the networks due to the RIAA's threats... but new arrivals will probably mask any people leaving this way in terms of the overall filesharing "population."
--- Bwah?
The RIAA has decided that the holiday season is a season of giving...subpeonas.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
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.
You might scare people into stopping downloading, but that doesn't mean we'll go back to buying your overpriced CDs. $11.99 is a start. Better yet, try $7.99 just like the old LPs.
Of course, it wasn't really the lawsuits that dissuaded me so much as the utter crap the labels have been putting out. But still, effective tactics are effective tactics. Why, I'll bet they could stop music piracy completely in 2004 if the tunes continue to be as gut-wrenchingly terrible as, say, Britney's last album (or any of those that preceded it, come to think of it. She sure is hot, though).
On a related note, there's an interesting article in the SF Chronicle about how small local bars are getting hit with lawsuits because the bands they hire play covers of copyrighted songs. Wonder how far we are from surgical lobotomies for people who get copyrighted tunes stuck in their heads...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Now, since they are settling everything for $3-5K, and since a good, federal-bar qualified lawyer is going to run $$$, and your downside hits $50K, well, who's the sucker going to be?
... comes in another year when piracy is down but so are profits. Funny thing happens when you develop an antagonistic relationship with your customers instead of following the age-old law of supply and demand.
-madgeorge
Based on the numbers that you can see on Slyck.com, after years of consistent growth, p2p usage is down substantially for the last few months, especially on the networks believed to be actively monitored by the RIAA, with the decline starting at the same time as the filing of the first lawsuits. And based on the announcements by Apple, Napster, MusicMatch, etc., digital music sales appear to be up substantially over the past few months as well. So while coorelation can't prove causality, it sure looks like the lawsuits are effective at making some people stop using the p2p file sharing networks, and might even be helping with digital download music sales.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
So does this mean they aren't going to be charging me an extra quarter per blank cd now?
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.
Lets give the RIAA what they want.
Don't download commercial music that you are not allowed to possess.
Instead, try iRATE and get free, legal mp3s.
You don't have to pirate music, and you can still kick the RIAA where it hurts (mindshare).
P.S. I'm a musican and I lost my hard work to illegal mp3 downloads. I sold only 400 CDs and my music was downloaded thousands of times and is all over mp3 sites. I give up....I'm $10,000 in debt and everyone is enjoying my creations.......this was my thanks. It's not the Major labels that are being killed, it's people like me. Cockroaches are the last to die.
Well, Michael, you should probably stop touching children and concentrate on your music. That's very, very, very Devilish...
-dameron
Considering that these "thieves" are a sizable fraction of their potential customer base, I'd be worried about lost business.
To extend your example:
If fifteen percent of the people entering your store shoplift something, do you just spend your time throwing them out, or do you consider that there might be something wrong with the way your business operates?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
I find it disturbing that the RIAA is claiming it is acting on behalf of record labels that it doesn't even represent.
NPR radio has a story about several record labels (notably Fat Wreck Chords, one of my personal favs) that had to fight for years to get their names removed from the list of labels the RIAA claims to represent, since they do not want to be represented by them.
Stranger things have happened. The United States Supreme Court recently overturned the last of the sodomy laws in the United States, a decision that at one time would have been inconcievable to the majority of Americans, but the gay community worked together patiently to make homosexuality completely legal.
Now, I want you to consider that there are over sixty million Americans practicing peer-to-peer file sharing. That's more people than voted for George Bush, and also more than the number of homosexuals in America. So it's not unreasonable that copyright could be repealed, or at least reformed.
I discuss the background of copyright law in the US and what you can do to make file sharing legal in Change the Law, a section of my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads. The steps I suggest you take to make file sharing legal are to speak out, vote, write your elected representatives, donate money to political campaigns, support campaign finance reform, join the electronic frontier foundation, and to practice civil disobedience.
It is my objective that all sixty million American p2p users will read my article by the time of the 2004 election. I've got a long ways to go to reach that goal.
The article has a Creative Commons license. I encourage you to copy and distribute it. I'm also seeking help in translating it to other languages; a Romanian translation will be posted soon.
Thank you for your attention.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
You shouldn't expect 12 year olds to have the same understanding of things as 32 year olds. If you're going to start doing that, you might as well just abolish the whole idea of children needing any guidance. Abolish driving ages, drinking ages, enlistment ages. No more juvenile courts or corrections centers. Don't hold parents responsible for anything or expect them to provide for the children at all once they're physically capable of working for themselves, etc.
NOT a good idea.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
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...
...and has been practiced for years by record stores, that is, stores that actually still sell vinyl records (primarily DJ shops). You open the package. You take the record (or cd's in a used cd store) out of the package and place it in a turntable or cd player behind the counter. You hand the customer headphones. Customer listens. If customer likes it he buys it, if not he hands you a different CD to listen to.
File-sharing isn't as popular as it is because people want to *own* the music. It's popular because people just want to hear what it sounds like before they buy it. If I wanted to actually *own* those songs it sure would't be in mp3 format (80% data loss), and without any liner notes, catalogs, or stickers.
I mean, when you buy an $8 t-shirt at wal-mart, you get to try it on first, right? When you want to buy a $10 book, you get to browse it at the bookstore before you buy it. Why should an $18.99 CD be any different?
Try-before-you-buy has always been my reason for using filesharing for music, if I hear a CD I like I buy it, that is if I can even find it at the store (thanks again RIAA).
But the RIAA will never pursue this method of both reducing piracy and meeting the consumers' needs, because they have zero interest in one of those two things. Guess which one. I maintain my opinion that the RIAA is terrified of file-sharing not because of any loss of profits to them (they're doing just fine, thanks) or to their artists (who they've been ripping off since the '20's), but because it means the average music consumer will no longer be satisfied with the STINKING, VOMITOUS, VILE, REPUGNANT, DISGUSTING, MALODOROUS, REPULSIVE SHIT being passed off as "popular" music by the RIAA. People have no option if they want to hear good music but to turn to the black market, for in this case the black market happens to be the only free, or even fair, market around.
All that could change if the music stores let you listen before you bought. For some reason, though, I'm not holding my breath.
They will never stop until somebody makes the
"Excuse me sir but I just moved into town and I am required by law to let all my neighbors know that I am a convicted music pirate"
Which raises a question. If you were nailed by the RIAA, and forced to choose between a multi-million dollar settlement and betraying your friends/coworkers, which would you choose? Before getting too heroic, remember that life after bankruptcy might not be fun. Do you know how your friends/coworkers would answer the question?
Even if you're a tight-knit secretive ring that knew each other from childhood, all it takes is one ring member participating in p2p.
who's the sucker going to be?Obviously: a lawyer... somebody who can do their own legal work for free. I wonder if the RIAA checks first before serving papers?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
1. Build yourself a XPC or something that size.
2. Toss in the needed parts including a 200G HD and a PCI 802.11b card.
3. Post notices around the dorm/building/whatever with the SSID and quick instuctions.
4. Enjoy.
While the selection of files in the beginning will be low I'm sure it would take little time for it to become quite varied.
The other solution is to buy a cheap 802.11b router, hook up to the LAN and bury it behind some sheetrock. The campus IT dept could spend years looking for it (if done correctly).
Of course this information is for educational purposes only yada yada yada ...
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST