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RIAA Claims P2P Has Been Contained
Magorak writes "USA Today is reporting the RIAA now claims that the issues surrounding P2P and piracy have been contained and are no longer as big an issue as they once were. From the article; 'The problem has not been eliminated,' says association CEO Mitch Bainwol. 'But we believe digital downloads have emerged into a growing, thriving business, and file-trading is flat.'"
So you're going to stop sueing college kids?
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I can still get on Gnutella and find almost every song that exists. What a bunch of nonsense. I believe they are just saying this so they can save face in the midst of their defeat.
What would you do?
Seriously...
If file trading is measured in terms of ease of use, then the number of available outlets has dropped. Things like Napster and the WinMX utility used to make file swapping incredibly easy even for people who weren't computer savvy. Now it takes a little work to get what you want. Plus, the major public file sharing networks are full of incomplete files, viruses and other garbage that most people don't want to deal with. In that way, people are either turning to harder-to-use file sharing techniques or giving up and getting a "real" copy of the media from a service that you know is good.
Your average user is using LimeWare and used to typing words into a search box. Doing this these days will usually yield you one or two real copies, and hundreds of viruse files or trojans.
It appears that the cost of finding, suing and obtaining judgments has shown some reduction in profit margin. Cost probably goes up exponentially trying to go after fewer and fewer pirates especially when the remaining few are savvier.
What the RIAA is saying is that they have instilled enough fear in the general populace to keep trading files being a household activity.
Digital downloads have emerged into a growing, thriving business despite your lot's best efforts to screw it all up.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Actually, I'm guessing it's more along the lines of
Most people are downloading from iTunes, and we are making money so we don't care much anymore.
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Wait, so you're saying that because the RIAA claims to have 'crushed Indy artists' (which doesn't explain my CD case, but okay), that it's time for us to bomb a federal building, killing civilians and children in the process?
I just want to make sure that that's really what you're saying. Because that might actually be the stupidest, most misguided statement I've ever read in all of my years on the internet. I suddenly understand why the draw of 27 virgins is capable of convincing men to kill themselves in the process of bombing other people!
Actually, that might be the stupidest thing I've heard in my entire life. I... I think you're causing me to have an aneuerysm.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Well, if you can't really achieve victory, just change the goalposts to something easier and calim you won.
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
Clearly some people have not [downloaded and] watched enough movies to know better than to be this foolhardy.
RIAA Claims P2P Has Been Contained
That's they said about the Aliens too...
Optimist: The thumb drive is half empty! Pessimist: The thumb drive is half full...
But even though the rest of us have been trying to stuff this idea into their tiny little skulls, they have to declare moral victory so they don't lose face?
Yes, they do.
Their company exists to protect the interests of their member copyright holders against widespread unauthorized copying.
Up to now their members/customers/owners have been interpreting the "internet piracy" as lost sales - or at least more sales lost than sales gained by free advertising, etc. - and they didn't have a download business model.
In this atmosphere, if they were to declare surrender, their members/customers/owners would just let them die - or replace their execs with new ones who would attempt to carry on the fight.
But now "this stuff" is beginning to percolate into the skulls of the RIAA's customers. And many of them do have a way to profit directly from authorized downloads (thanks to iTunes and the like). So it's now possible for both the RIAA and its clientele to look at things more rationally. They can entertain the possibility that unauthorized downloading, like pre-Betamax-decision videotaping of broadcasts, might not be an unmitigated disaster - and may even be a Good Thing (especially once the for-pay alternative is available for honest people who are more than browsing.)
So the RIAA can now back off its enforcement efforts and go back to more reasonable functions, such as hunting down mass-production pirates, collecting royalties from broadcasters and those creating commercial public performances, and so on.
But on their way out they still need to declare victory - not just to save their own tails, but to keep some pressure on downloaders to go to the commercial services and pay the 99 cents, and to keep in the public mind the idea that they SHOULD do so.
(Of course they can claim to their clientele (with some justification) that their efforts to date are what branded this concept into "the public mind" in the first place.)
Meanwhile, now that the clients see that the "piracy" isn't going to sink their ships they can get on with the job of making product and making money off it, and taking advantage of the new medium to make even more profit.
New media mean new opportunities for profit, and these opportunities are greater than the (largely illusory) "losses" from the unauthorized copying they enable. This was shown with piano rolls, wax tube recordings, disk recordings, radio broadcasting, and tape recordings.
Now it has been shown with digital recordings and network distribution. But it's sufficiently counter-intuitive to The Suits that they have to learn it fresh every time.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Whenever there's a school holiday, you can count on the **AA to claim major victories against file trading.
When the kids go home for the summer, or Christmas break, or spring break (probably what they are looking at in this case), trading traffic declines because the kids lose some of that school bandwidth and access to computers, or they go home and get busy goofing off outside or working summer jobs, etc.
Whatever the case, traffic drops.
Cue the **AA to stand up and claim the drop means they're suddenly being more effective at shutting down piracy. It's got almost nothing to do with the **AA and everything to do with the natural ebb and flow of the people who consume the content. They're not stopping out of fear. They stop because they're away from keyboard.
When school resumes, traffic goes right back up if not higher and stays there until the next school holiday when it drops down again, at which point the **AA will again attempt to justify its own existence by posting another press release. It's lies, damn lies, and statistics. Nothing more.
Interestingly enough, the fact that traffic goes down during these breaks says that people are finding other things to do with their time instead of stealing content, which means the stolen content is automatically devalued to the extent that whatever else the kids are doing is more important to them. Since the **AA think their content equals gold unequaled, they cannot have people thinking there is something better to do with their time than watch or listen. Instead they take credit for the drops as a matter of enforcement rather than recognizing that it's simply the audience making a choice to consume or do something that doesn't involve content -a FAR more frightening concept to accept when you're whole reason for being is to push the value of content.