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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.'"
Looks like Grandma and her illegal downloads of the "Happy Birthday" song can rest easy once again.
Mission accomplished!
We won!
I tried hard to come up with a serious comment to this article, I really did. But every time I started writing one, I starting giggling. The RIAA is just too much. So, then, let me be the first to say:
BAHAHAHAHAHAAH
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
So you're going to stop sueing college kids?
http://ablegray.com
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.
If you cannot win, claim victory.
Pirate 1: Arrr! The RIAA ship has been swashbuckled! Pirate 2: Ayye! The fools even think they sunk us! ARRR!
Isn't that like a /.er's parent saying "My child doesn't spend that much time on the computer"?
file-trading is flat.
I actually think of it more as a rectangular prism....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Was the guy who made this press release doing so on the deck of a ship with a big "Mission accomplished" sign behind him?
Any chance there?
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
What would you do?
Seriously...
Would appear that the writer of the story does what writers do best, not research facts. Appears that they're still using the same old sorry BS of CD sales dropped 30% in whatever year it was. When in fact, what has been shown is that it was singles that dropped ( you know, the things you can't find any more, because people aren't willing to pay 5 dollars for 1 song on a CD ), during that year CD sales actually increased.
Overall the article is rather blah, I'm sort of surprised that they didn't throw in there something about the lose of some umpteen billion dollars that they would have made if it weren't for illegal file sharing...the good myth of each download is a lost sale.
A story about Microsoft calling a truce with the GPL followed by the RIAA saying P2P is not a problem.
/. has been hacked and someone is posting bogus stories.
It's not April 1st.
Hmmm... Only logical explanation is that
--Keith
It's true - because everyone who is going to do P2P download is now doing it.
So he is right; P2P growth is flat - in exactly the same way TV purchase growth is flat.
Note any shortage of TVs around the first world? alas not...
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.
Apparently your grammar has been "contained" as well.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Digital downloads have emerged into a growing, thriving business despite your lot's best efforts to screw it all up.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
You know what? Maybe they have won, if student pirating has been curbed to the extent that they want. And if more digital downloads are legal now than before, then that's great. It probably means that more companies are getting a clue about how to take advantage of the business model, but we'll let the RIAA save face.
All we want them to do is quit trying to stomp out every conceivable method of information transfer in the name of stopping piracy, and go back to their executive boardrooms and golf courses.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Just... where have I heard that before...
Well, if you can't win, just say you won and rely on your opponent to not contradict you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Dude, I don't actually care. If they're trying to convince the public that filesharing is no longer a threat to them... HOORAY! I can share without guilt or fear of reprisal!
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
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.
Find coupons in Greeley
Yeah, as soon as they stop downloading and listening to inane anime music.
First, MS declares a truce with Open Source.
Then, the RIAA stops chasing P2P downloaders.
Next, Hell freezes over.
What a day!
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.
Some prankster let free all the dangerous animals on a zoo. The public was in panic, so the zoo chief gathered all the people inside the lion's cage. Then they locked it from inside.
"We're safe! The animals are contained!"
...welcome our oblivious overlords.
That number is huge but hasn't grown substantially, while video piracy has. "The music industry isn't seeing double-digit growth in piracy anymore, but Hollywood is," Garland says.
So in other words, they're handing over the job of showering their customers with lawsuits to the MPAA. What's that, a relay race? Share the bad press for stomping on people's rights so nobody gets hurt too much?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Of course they've won. They've got the "get rid of allofmp3.com" as one of the requirements for Russia to join the WTO, and they've got Sweden raiding (apparently against Swedish law) ThePirateBay just because the U.S. asked! Seriously, this isn't about P2P. This is about controlling distribution channels. You don't go after BitTorrent because you people are using it to pirate your copyrighted material. You go after the people distributing the copies. (Just like you don't go after Ford because people use cars to move drugs around the country. On the other hand, if you are a cartel of taxi drivers, removing private cars from the road is a great way to guaranteed revenues.) They only way I'll believe this is the end of it is if I see sales figures for RIAA members dropping drastically (and then they'd just blame pirates...).
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...
Everyone SHUT THE HELL UP and let them believe it is contained. SHHHHH. Seriously.
Cheers.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
if you can't really achieve victory, just change the goalposts to something easier and calim you won.
I used to have a Project Manager who did that for his trainwreck projects. His projects were *always* successful. Unfinished requirements became "future enhancements". Non-working projects became "proof of concepts". Half-baked projects became "prototypes".
The wonderful thing about project schedules and requirements is nobody saves the previous version.
Nobody has ever underestimated the gullibility of upper-managers.
And nobody has ever underestimated the gullibility of people who read industry press releases.
"Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad! Be assured, Baghdad is safe, protected!"
"We have retaken the airport. There are NO Americans there. I will take you there and show you. IN ONE HOUR!"
"We defeated them yesterday!"
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
TMS - Typical Movie Scientist
TMG - Typical Movie General
TMG: Doc, what's the status of the plague?
TMS: As of an hour ago, the virus has infected every living thing on Earth.
TMG: But it hasn't spread since then?
TMS: Well, no, but--
TMG: Then it's been contained! Victory is ours!
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
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
But this doesn't kill the "music industry". There will always be a need for a legitimation structure -- an industry that sifts the amateurish crap from the high-quality art. But it won't be done through "push" marketing: "Britney is the next Madonna (as if Madonna was a major artist anyway)! Coldplay is the next U2!" No, listeners will want good information about who's doing what, and they'll decide who's the next what. RIAA has got so distracted shrieking about "piracy" that they've forgotten their core competency: put simply: telling good from bad. That's a service people will always want and pay for.
I don't neglect the obvious fact that the RIAA not been a bastion of good taste recently; they've focused for over a decade on making the bad look good, in order to simplify their lives by stamping formula music out of a mold and just marketing it all to hell so that people buy it. Or payolizing it so that people don't realize there's anything else out there. But those days are numbered.
But getting audio files (in whatever format) into the hands of listeners? Sorry, the mechanism there is well-understood and staggeringly efficient.
Comments on movies in another post. Maybe.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I am curious to see if the RIAA ever considered that the reason music piracy levels are not increasing is because everyone already has all the songs they want. It's not like the RIAA is flooding the market with an excess of quality releases.