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Cuban Says RIAA Damages Should be $5 Per Month
Thomas Hawk writes "Mark Cuban is arguing over at Blog Maverick that with the introduction of Yahoo!'s new $5 per month music service that this needs to become the new de facto 'damages' that the RIAA ought to be able to claim when suing kids. After all, when the kids could have paid for the music via Yahoo! for $5 a month it makes it hard to say the music loss is worth more than that. 'The RIAA can no longer claim that students who are downloading music are costing them thousands of dollars each. They cant claim much of anything actually. In essence, Yahoo just turned possession of a controlled music substance into a misdemeanor. Payable by a $5 per month fine.'"
I thought subscription based services like Rhapsody and Yahoo were just streaming. If you want to acutally download the song and listen to it from somewhere else than your internet-connected computer, you had to pay an additional fee ($.79/song in Yahoo's case) I mean, if I could actually DOWNLOAD an unlimited amount of music and listen to it on all my PCs, on an mp3 player, and burn it to CD to listen in a car, for $5/month or even $20/month I'd jump at the chance. But I'm not going to pay $5/month for the privelege of listening to music and the ability to pay more to buy it.
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There's compensatory damages, and punitive damages.
Punitive damages can be significantly more than actual losses. That's deliberate.
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I don't know if you realize, but that 5 dollars per month has to be paid EVERY month. Once you stop paying, the collection is worthless. On the other hand, with P2P songs you get to keep them forever.
Second, they will not play on iPods, only certain Microsoft backed "Play for Sure" devices.
Third, free is still cheaper than $3000, assuming you're 20 and live another 50 years.
Fourth, P2P files are unencumbered with any DRM. Thus, you're getting more value for NO money.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Generally though, you said it: the issue is one of damage. From the point of view of the recording industry, someone who distributes (directly and indirectly) one of their albums to millions (remember, I said directly and indirectly) of anonymous strangers is far, far, more damaging than someone who removes one copy of a CD from circulation without paying for it. From their point of view, the latter constitutes the removal of 2c of plastic from sale plus $5-10 (or so) in lost revenue (after retail margins etc.) The other constitutes, potentially, tens of thousands to millions of dollars in lost revenues through lost sales.
Which would you be more concerned about if you're heavily investing large quantities of money into funding the creation, recording, and promotion of music?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
How would such a tax work when there is a very large proportion of ISP subscribers who don't and will never download media illegally? I have a feeling those users would be up in arms about it.
I understand that in Canada and a few other nations there is an excise tax on blank media to account for the potential piracy. It doesn't resolve the problem completely - people who have only legitimate uses for the blank media still pay the tax. But people with a computer and a CD-R drive don't have to pay the tax. And you only pay the tax in proportion to how much blank media you use. PLUS, the tax is relatively small for average-joe-burner. How do we implement such a "more fair" system for downloading media?
We make only the music downloaders pay the "tax" which, in this case, would be a $5/mo fee for Yahoo! music or the fee for another music provider of your choice.
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As far as shoplifting punishment goes it brings up a good argument versus the article... As far as the law is concerned if you get caught shoplifting you cant just say fine here I'll pay the price of the item and go off on your merry way. If that was the case it would make the most sense to just shoplift everything and only pay when you get caught. The article goes even further really implying you should be able to say "well sure the store i stole it at charges $20 for this item but i saw it on sale somewhere else for $5 so i'll only pay you that". In the end it makes sense that the punishment for failing to pay for something exceeds the price you would pay legally.
BitTorrent is much fuzzier, because except for the first seeder, individual clients aren't uploading and downloading entire files - they're uploading and downloading small chunks, so rather than uploading 5 copies of a 1GB movie, one to each of 5 people, you might have uploaded 5GB of total stuff spread out over 25 people.
Some P2P applications do this as well. It raises a good question though -- what happens when you're only uploading small chunks? Is it still infringing because it's still part of the song?
What would happen if a P2P client broke files down into really small chunks so you download non-sequential chunks (though all at once, to save overhead) from different sources.. Each individual person would NOT be uploading actual music (if you tried to play the individual upload stream, it would either not work or be random garbage), they'd be uploading essentially random streams of data. Once you had all these random streams from different sources, you could reassemble it back into a song.
Speak before you think