CMU Professor's Rebuttal Against RIAA Propaganda

jsc writes "On Sunday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an article by Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, stating that university students are hijacking Internet2 to pirate copyrighted works, and schools who don't actively combat file-sharing are teaching their students bad values like "acceptance of theft". The Post-Gazette didn't let Sherman get away with it, though... Today they published a letter to the paper from Roger Dannenberg, a professor of Computer Science and Music at Carnegie Mellon University, reminding everyone how past/present behavior of the RIAA and its members is an even worse model of values..."

Comments

Lacking Content

[Mathonwy]

I hate the MPAA/RIAA as much as anyone, but I wish this letter had had more meat in it. In particular, the final point ("I know people who haven't gotten their checks from you guys, so nyah") is a pretty weak...

The first part is ok, I just wish there were more of it. It's not like the recording industry's history doesn't have enough hypocricy to fill several articles. That would have made a better impression. "Extending musical copyrights for centuries is absurd, and clearly just a money grab" is a much better argument (imho) than "You steal from us, so it's ok if we steal back".

Uphill Battle

[DumbSwede]

Here is my take on why the MPAA and RIAA will fail in trying to realize all of their draconian measures. We are headed into a sea of entertainment choices, and while the MPAA and the RIAA would like to make sailing these seas a cash cow with DMCA, it seems unlikely that will succeed. The RIAA is screaming about shrinking revenues and blames piracy. Piracy is a partial answer to why RIAA revenues are not increasing at projected rates. Actually shrinking (yet) is debatable depending on whose numbers you use. But here is a better list of reasons the RIAA is no longer getting what it thinks are its just dues:

1. People have been use to getting free music for decades -- ever since the birth of radio.
2. People used to feel the money paid on records was mostly in the physical process of making records and distributing them, but now they see with 10 cent CDROMS and 1/10 of a cent per Meg of disk space that playback mediums are now virtually free.
3. A lot of people feel recorded music is all advertising. Why would you listen to an artist if you hadn't already heard the artist and why would you pay for something you've already heard?
4. In the past people bought records they heard on the radio only because they didn't have a convenient way to record just the songs they wanted and to index, label, store, and retrieve them.
5. In the past people didn't feel like chumps for plunking down $10 for and album and $15 for a CD, because there weren't millions of others are getting this stuff for free. Let me make the point clearer - even if the RIAA scares someone into not downloading music from the net, the willingness to pay full price will also be diminished because the tantalizing free stuff lies just a wire away.
6. Some portion of the potential audience feels that musicians are over compensated, immoral, prima donnas that can't actually perform outside a recording studio without 100 retakes and then special post processing to improve their marginally capable voices.
7. Some people prefer live music and think money paid for a live show is the only real compensation music artists should expect.
8. Music artists and the RIAA are seen as hypocrites hawking anti-establishment messages and then looking for special rights, powers, and protection from the establishment to maintain their empire.
9. Ever since the death of the 45-rpm single, people have felt coerced into buying all of the songs on a CD or album when all they wanted was a song or two.
10. When people buy something they like to feel they actually own it and can do what ever they want with it. You can buy or subscribe to music singles again these days, but not without some flavor of DMCA. Some more draconian than others.

So ironically it is not that some huge percentage of the population is listening to bootleg music, though they probably would if the RIAA weren't fighting this loosing rear guard action, but that the cheapness of distributing music has been uncovered and become known because bootleggers exist. That Genie is not going back in the bottle -- maybe they should change their business models instead.

i2p will make this all moot

[gremlins]

Just wait till everyone is using i2p. Then the RIAA can't really do anything about it.

On that note I agree with the assertion this letter raises that the RIAA and similar groups are only intrested in the law when it suits them. When it doesn't they either disregard it or spend tons of money to buy our congressmen so they can have it changed.

Re:Robin Hood

[ashmedai]

Bingo. It's not that stealing is okay if it's from a thief. It's that it's really stupid for a morally bankrupt group to complain about every individual incidence of copyright infringement when they can't even prove the act deprived them of a potential sale they say they deserve on the basis of junk science and fabricated statistics. It's that the amount of lies and slander they propigate in attempt to sway public opinion in favor of their greed-motivated witch hunt is just plain horrific. And then there's the issue of the Orwellian legislation they push through with the help of the government that we're supposed to be able to trust to protect us from such things, as if Homeland Security wasn't edging towards a police state already on its own.

Exactly what the RIAA companies stole from us

[Simonetta]

The RIAA companies stole the public domain. They bribed the politicians to pass laws that indefinitely extend the copyright period on all published materials since the first third of the 20th century.
Under the legal principal that creates the authority of copyright protection, artistic materials must become part of the public domain after a set period of time. Bribing politicians to continously extend this period on materials that have reached the limit of their copyright is stealing from the public. It's like agreeing to pay a certain amount for an item only to find that the seller has doubled the price on the day that last payment is due... extending the number of payments that you have to make for another fifty years into the future.

And they haven't done this just once; they have done it repeatedly. Which establishes a pattern of confirmed criminal behavior in a court of law. And confirmed criminals don't get to decide what the laws are going to be for everyone else.

No civilized people or government should stand for this.

When we copy and freely distribute, we are reclaiming what has been stolen from us already. Reclaiming it from the people who have committed the biggest crime in artistic history; the theft of the public domain.

It must be pointed out over and over again:
The RIAA has no legal, moral, or ethical authority to call anyone criminals.

Plain and simple in any culture, at any time.