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Apple and Pepsi Ad Sports RIAA Targets
eefsee writes "USA Today is running a story about Pepsi's Superbowl ad for their iTunes promotion. The ad will apparently feature teens sued by the RIAA, including one young woman who holds out a Pepsi and says, 'We are still going to download music for free off the Internet.' The RIAA response? 'This ad shows how everything has changed.'"
Corporate forces taking aim at the RIAA shows that the RIAA's business model is failing, and no amount of lawsuits, subpoenas, and para-military crap is going to stop it.
Either the RIAA can join in and make money, or they can sit back and hopelessly try to defend an oppressive business model that has been rendered technologically obsolete.
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unfortunately taking a jab at the RIAA like this will do absolutely nothing. It will take more than a commercial make fun of them to make them stop this witch hunt.
As the RIAA responds "this is the way it is supposed to be" they will probably be filling out the next batch of legal filings accusing more senior citizens of stealing songs. The worst part of all this is that here they are making money off legal downloads while they attack people like rabid dogs trying to make more money.
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
...the RIAA is all in favor of the spot. They still get their royalty money for the 100 million "free" downloads.
I think you have this wrong! We still live in the bleak and horrible past where most of the music the world has made is stuffed in vaults. Where most of the money which is used to buy music goes to the management. Sort of like directing cigarette advertising towards kids, and then telling them they can't smoke! Who exactly is wrong here?
Fuck them. Once again, it's not theft. It's copyright infringement. Fuck them.
The radio stations in my town (Orlando, FL) call pretty much all their promotional CD giveaways "Win it before you can burn it" or a similar reference to downloading music online. One of the rock stations even played a promo for awhile that basically poked fun at "little Billy" for downloading music off the internet and while they didn't say it directly, prison rape was implied with a soap dropping reference. If this promo was run as a Slashdot post, it would have been modded down as troll.
Let's face it, while an ad during the Superbowl seems like a big deal to us geeks, people ALREADY know about teens being busted by the RIAA. While the buzz has definitly gotten around to non-techie people, people just aren't getting worked up over this enough to actually do anything about it.
As much as it's considered taboo to say "downloading music is stealing" on Slashdot, that's what many people who do not download music see it as - teens getting sued by the RIAA for stealing music. It really doesn't tug on your heartstrings when that's what you see it as. You gotta remember, the average person who doesn't use P2P services probably does not understand the chances for the wrong people getting accused by the RIAA. They don't realize the RIAA is basically extorting people for absurd amounts of money to settle or face civil prosecution and all the costs associated with it. They don't realize the RIAA is abusing its monopoly and rips off its artists. All people see are teens stealing music.
I see something much more sinister in the Pepsi commercial. I see the RIAA getting its way for $1 a track. I see once insubordinate teens that have been "shown the light" by becoming corporate whores and bowing to the RIAA's will. It only took Apple 20 years to be associated with a superbowl commercial totally opposite of their 1984 vision. This time, big brother wins.
It's a good thing I drink coke.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Sorry, for picking you from among the many who are echoing such sentiments, but how is this "less evil than before"? As far as I can tell (not having yet seen the ad and given the article's details), the former defendants will be on the tube, hats in hand, promoting a pay service to obtain files over the Internet. Furthermore, the AAC files Apple sells on the iTMS are DRM'ed. This is everything the RIAA could have hoped for: former P2P'ers nodding to the beat of paying for their downloads.
Also keep in mind that members of the RIAA get a take of money earned by the iTMS if those tracks are copyrighted by RIAA-affiliated labels, and many are.
Don't get me wrong. I think iTMS is great (I'm a Mac head from way back who loves UNIX) and have maybe a couple dozen songs with the "m4p" extension. I also used Napster maybe a dozen times and hated the RIAA's campaign to destroy one of the best databases the world has ever known. But with the exception of profiting from digital music distribution, I don't see how the RIAA has changed at all.
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Downloading is not what got any of these people in trouble. Sharing -- making the songs available for download -- got them in trouble. They cannot tell what individuals downloaded. They can tell what individuals made available for download and confirm it by downloading it!
If you want to know why the RIAA is hip to this, just think a moment. It blurs the activity. Illegal downloading is now the problem in the public's mind. By saying they litigated on the demand side rather than the supply side, they make people worry about whether the downloads can be tracked.
I respect that the RIAA needs to enforce the publishing rights of its members. Given how creepy most people think the RIAA is, I don't see why the reinforce the perception by perpetuating a lie.
Why shouldn't they compliment the ad? The RIAA wants the money they (and their component labels) get when you buy a CD. Since (as many others have noted) they also get a cut of the cost of a track downloaded through legal music services on the Internet (and have probably set their fee to divide out to the same amount per song), the RIAA has no reason to discourage downloads from which they get their appropriate payment (and the control they assert in what is offered).
RIAA labels still have preferential access to music on radio, they still control their supply chain, and they're getting paid. What's even better is that the while the ad might portray Apple as standing up to the RIAA, Apple (and its customers) are paying them for the music all the same. It's like beer ads that preach mass-market nonconformity as a panacea for conformity - it allows people to feel that they're hurting the RIAA by buying iTunes while giving RIAA precisely what it wants from them (control over music choice, and money).
The RIAA should be cheering - they negate some of their opposition and get paid if they just sit back and shut up. They haven't changed - they still want control over aspects of music they have already shown they can't be trusted with. They're just smarter about it.
well that's sort of true...yet I think the lesson might also be that the RIAA is roadkill and the subject of public mockery. Sure Pepsi is milking this incident for their own profit, but that doesn't make RIAA less like roadkill. The Pepsi drinking crowd and the music sharing crowd are overlapping sets; Pepsi is saying "we are listening" and that counts for a lot when RIAA certainly are not listening. Has no practical impact on music sharing of course.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
If I get a loan from a bank to buy a house or a car, and I pay the loan back on time and in good faith, the bank doesn't keep my house or car. Not during the payback period and not after.
Now if I'm PAID to make a house or car, I don't get to keep the house or car I made.
If I don't like my employer, there are plenty of other cats to go to. The RIAA is a monopoly of the available employers for a particular industry. Smaller employers (indie labels) have a hard time breaking in.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
...stuffed in vaults. Safes, fireproof boxes... most of what was available on vinyl, never made it to cd. most of what is recorded, was never thought to have "commercial" value in the mass production sense. So, I mean actually stuffed in vaults, decaying. Films also suffer the same fate. By the contracts the band itself signs you, of course, mean the only viable contract. As if there were an alternative. You, of course, mean the contract where the artist pays for the wining and dining necessary to get airplay. "Payola" is such an old term! They're now called "music marketers," the most influential of which is actually upstairs from my office.
In the bleak and horrible past, people made decisions for us.