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DefectiveByDesign Supporters to Call on RIAA Execs
johnsu01 writes "DefectiveByDesign.org is organizing a call-in campaign for today. People around the country will be calling high-ranking RIAA officials to deliver the message that DRM is an unacceptable restriction on the freedom of consumers and citizens. DefectiveByDesign will provide the numbers to call when you sign up. This action should attract the people who thought that Apple was not a good target because it is the RIAA that requires DRM and those who think that wearing HazMat suits is obnoxious. Everyone can vote with their dollars, but that doesn't tell the RIAA why they aren't getting the dollars. With a few thousand people signed up already, they will undoubtedly know after today."
Chairman Ted Stevens (AK), (202) 224-3004
John McCain (AZ), (202) 224-2235
Conrad Burns (MT), Main: 202-224-2644
Trent Lott (MS), (202) 224-6253
Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX), (202) 224-5922
Gordon H. Smith (OR), (202) 224 3753
John Ensign (NV), (202) 224-6244
George Allen (VA), (202) 224-4024
John E. Sununu (NH), (202) 224-2841
Jim DeMint (SC), (202) 224-6121
David Vitter (LA),(202) 224-4623
Co-Chairman Daniel K. Inouye (HI), (202) 224-3934
John D. Rockefeller (WV), (202) 224-6472
John F. Kerry (MA), (202) 224-2742
Barbara Boxer (CA), (202) 224-3553
Bill Nelson (FL), (202) 224-5274
Maria Cantwell (WA), (202) 224-3441
Frank R. Lautenberg (NJ), (202) 224-3224
E. Benjamin Nelson (NE), (202) 224-6551
Mark Pryor (AR), (202) 224-2353
eMusic. $0.25 per song (or less!), over a million songs to choose from in many different genres. And what they send you is unencumbered MP3s. No DRM, universal compatibility. Try it out for free by downloading a recent Winamp -- 50 free songs are included. (or sign up for a 14-day, 25 song trial via their website). Support good non-RIAA music!
Note: I have no affiliation with eMusic, other then being a satisfied customer.
These don't look like RIAA executive numbers to me...these look like the numbers of elected officials in washington?
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
These numbers have nothing to do with the RIAA.... They are all Senators, some on the Senate Appropriations Committee and some are on the Commerce Committee and others.
I think you missed the point. The parent suggested we use a boycott to protect ourselves from DRM. However DRM is an infringement of citizens right to access the cultural heritage of humanity. I was pointing out that if we decide to fight this one using dollars as votes then the RIAA, who as a collective organisation and not an individual should have precisely no say on a rights issue has billions of dollars (votes), while the average Armerican has a few tens of thousands of dollars (votes). That system is highly unfair since as this is a rights issue the people should be the ones to decide, given suitable moderation by a constrained government which errs on the side of protecting rights over following the will of the people.
No, "vigilanteism" would be stopping one of the execs in their Benz limo, dragging him out of the car, beating him to death in the street and setting his mutilated body on fire as an example to the others. A phone campaign is a legitimate form of protest, and the right of every American.
The main problem is money. Studio time is very expensive, and you'd either have to replicate it cheaply or fork over the rental cash (I'd favor a build-a-mini-studio option). CD songs might be a mix of upwards of 50 recordings per song - requiring good computers and lot of work to clean up each part.
That said, I'm in: zachary.pruckowski@gmail.com Let me know if I can help. I've done a lot of work at concerts in college (still there).
If you want to see what I'm talking about, check out http://www.chesky.com/ David Chesky has been doing minimalist recording and producing fantastic sounding albums for, I want to say, probably decades.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
They are launching a campaign to help deter DRM. It's a good thing that people are approaching the problem in cheap and creative ways. Suggestion it's a bad thing for them to protest sounds pretty communist to me.
The question is how effective will it be. Most of them probably screen the majority of their calls and will just start blocking calls. They don't care about the users. They are corporate evangalists trying to push morals on the consumers based on unrealistic claims of profit loss. This is something that companies controlling copyrighted works have dreamed of for years. I think DRM will prove to defeat itself or become ineffective as most media controlling standards have. If it does then Americans will sadly be exposed to even less of the arts.
The real trick isn't making people pay for art in whatever form you imagine. It's motivating them to really want it. I think with less free music on the market fewer people have the chance to experience a variety of music. This effectively makes music less popular to the cultures of the world by limiting it's availability. Perhaps the real solution is to remove record companies from the picture alltogether. Artists themselves should control their works and not let record companies control the industry because they provide a music distribution company. It really never made any sense to sign yourself over to a company like this, but record companies have the money to launch an artist where an independant artists has to truly have a loyal fanbase. With the combinition of greatly reduced recording and video production costs record companies are becoming less and less necessary. Ultimately it will be artists and consumers who are both hurt by DRM. If you sell your song on a media that then steals your song from you. You as the consumer may lose faith in the artists you bought from or in buying music in general. In few industries are limiting factors on distribution of a media product going to be an effective or even good idea.
These companies need to focus on new ways to sell ideas not on locking ideas away for less people to experience.
On the RIAA page, there is a list of labels that associate themselves with the RIAA - remember, the RIAA is a group of labels, and other music related 'entities' that like the lobbying power that the RIAA gives them.
Not buying CDs, videos or DRMd files is not going to hurt the RIAA - they make their money from 'dues' from the individual labels. Not buying CDs will only help the RIAA make a case that it's due to piracy, and make that case to those who make the laws.
However, if a boycott was organized that picked, let's say five, (smaller) labels from that list, and let them know that no CDs from them will be purchased that month or year by the organized boycott, calls of piracy hurting sales could be refuted on that smaller scale,(Not that they can't be refuted now...)
Labels who think that calling their customers thieves, handing out lawsuits, restricting fair use, and lobbying for the demise of independent music is ok will get a message that their customers will not stand for it.
Issues with this:
In order to work this boycott has to be big, organized, and educated. Big, so the set of music the particular few labels include intersect with the boycotting group. The boycott doesn't work if no one was going to buy that music anyway. Those sales 'lost' to apathy will be blamed on piracy, and used to lobby for more restrictions and copyrightholder power.
Oraganized, so that the chosen labels (picked by size and choice of music: see above) get an actual message : "You are being boycotted by x number of people who have agreed that they will not buy your labels offerings until: (insert ultimatum here - hell freezes over, a year passes, or my favorite, disassociation with the RIAA) This notice should be sent anywhere that would reproduce it, and those not 'signed up' should be ...
Educated, so that they know what the RIAA is (not a company per se, but a collection of companies), why the boycott is happening, and how they can help.
There are certainly other things to take into account, such as the 'list' is by design, not accurate. There have been cases where the RIAA has claimed membership by some small (and suddenly successful) lables, in order to present a 'united front' and spread the message that RIAA=success/no RIAA=obscurity.
I'm convinced that the only way to kill the RIAA is to go after the legs - small and medium labels that support it. Once these smaller labels have severed their connection with the RIAA, the RIAA will have less money to lobby for DRM and the extention of copyrights, less money to pay lawyers to sue your dead grandma, less money to push their skewed facts, figures and arguments to an uneducated public.
Remember, the RIAA's money comes from labels and manufacturing, whose money comes from you. Small, focused strikes by a large educated group are the only way to win.
I just phoned one of the execs (no answer after 12 rings) and will keep trying. I will post the phone numbers here, but I do encourage people to stand up and be counted by still signing up at the DefectiveByDesign.org website.
We need to take actions like this as a community, because it's our best (and possibly only) tool. We don't have lobbyists cozying up to government officials, and we don't have the money to pay to Learjet the politicians to a nice dinner on a private island. But we do have strength in numbers, and if only we have the backbone to stand up and make our views known, we can make a difference. Because I'm not sure the MAFIAA has backbone; their backs are stiff just because they're so stuffed with money.
By the way, the DefectiveByDesign.org web site only shows ten call reports from people having made phone calls. When I tried to submit my report, I got an error message. So maybe the site isn't working properly. I hope in the end we do get a tally of how many people responded.
Brad Buckles RIAA USA (202) 857-9607
Mitch Bainwol RIAA USA (202) 857-9651
Cary Sherman RIAA USA (202) 857-9632
Mitch Glazier USA RIAA (202) 857-9673
Neil Turkowitz RIAA USA (202) 857-9647
Steve Redmond BPI UK +44 (0)20 7803 1324
Peter Jamieson BPI UK +44 (0) 20 7803 1311
Matt Phillips BPI UK 44 (0) 77 3951 4963
Michael Haentjes IFPI Germany +49 (30) 59 00 38-0
Peter Zombik IFPI Germany +49 (30) 59 00 38-0
Jean never Foitzik IFPI Germany +49 (30) 59 00 38-23
Herve Rony SNEP France +33 (1) 44 13 66 66
Graham Henderson CRIA Canada 1 (416) 967-7272 ext. 102
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
That doesn't seem to be true. There are businesses selling DRM-free music. They have been mentioned in the "Alternatives" thread, and elsewhere. As an example, eMusic is listed as the #2 retailer of downloadable music. There are many artists giving away their music or selling it directly to fans in order to get people to come to their shows. It is only a small conglomerate of labels that feels they need DRM in order to stay alive. They might be right, but do not equate the continued profits of those few businesses with the success of music and culture in general. I would be interested to see any articles or statements from non-RIAA labels in support of DRM. I honestly haven't heard any. Isn't competition also an essential concept in free market economics?
You mean, how will you get paid more than 7 cents per song for your efforts? Eliminating the massive overhead that goes into distributing music via the current monopoly model will likely enable artists to be better off. Plus, it's not like all artists made a living before. Your question should actually be, "How will our few multimillion-dollar pop stars continue to get paid for their efforts?" Because an incredible number of talented musicians are already making no money under the current model. Artists will get paid because people like their music. People will pay to be the first to receive the new music, even if it can be freely distributed after that. People will pay for shows, for signed editions, and to encourage the production of more stuff they like.
I'm unfortunately not much of a kid anymore, but let's not forget that DRM applies to a lot more than music. It's being used by libraries on their audio books. It is applied to eBooks, including literature and educational materials. It's applied to the software that runs, well, just about everything these days. We are letting the companies who own this DRM technology dictate under what terms we can educate ourselves (and our kids) in ways that we have never allowed before. What are the ramifications of this?
Even if it's true that we need to provide a greater incentive to people to create useful works, that would only point to a need to find a better way to do it than restricting access to those works, since such restrictions have wide-ranging impacts (like bringing down entire incredibly useful infrastructures like P2P). Copyright was conceived to be exactly such a device; something artificial to promote useful works. So we have room to come up with other such devices if need be.
No, but the benefit of exclusive ownership of copyrighted works to the rights-holder does need to be balanced against the benefit to society. That's what it says in the Constitution, anyway. Copyright has a limited term of ownership (even though that keeps getting longer) and is not like physical property in ways that others around here have already explained. Creation should be rewarded, but the kind of exclusive control required to justify DRM is an attempt to turn this into a kind of property it was never intended to be.
I agree that we need to have a society that supports artists and musicians. It's a littl
By this argument, if our society and culture is defined by what people are trading on p2p servers today, I think that shows that everyone who is musically or poetically inclined had best get to work producing something better. Otherwise, let me out of this society....