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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!
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... 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,
These are getting seriously out of hand...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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"