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RIAA Drops P2P Lawsuit Strategy, Goes Local
An anonymous reader writes "Wondering why the RIAA hasn't announced 800 lawsuits per month any more? Well, they're still suing people, but have developed a new strategy according to Slyck.com. Instead the RIAA is looking to be more localized, focused and personal with its new strategy."
As another reader puts it, the RIAA "will opt to file lawsuits on a weekly basis and work with local media to give it a more geographically relevant feel." Perhaps they'll also pick their targets a bit more carefully.
Great.
piracy had been contained!? Is the RIAA talking out of both side of its mouth again. Or, does one hand of the RIAA not know what the other is doing? Hmm.
idm owns me
Ha. This is a repost, but I thought it good enough to give another chance - I really think someone should run with it.
...
Boycotting the RIAA will only result in more cries of, "Pirates! Pirates!". I think a different boycott is in order.
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.
Wondering why the RIAA hasn't announced 800 lawsuits per month any more?
World Cup?
839*929
Good points. They bring up a couple big questions for me:
1. How does the RIAA control the media so well? Are the big papers and news channels really lazy enough to only report things that have press releases?
2. For a group of companies that makes their money by essentially making idiots look cool, why are they so incapable of making non-piracy cool?
Yes, the threat of legislation and consistent bullying tactics are a surefire way to get me to "enjoy" my music legally. Basically all they want to do is make it look like they are catching people every day (and I'm sure they are) and then publicize that in local papers. I don't care if Robert Vaughn in Washington D.C. gets caught for file-sharing, but if Jimmy across the street gets a fine, well then I'd better be scared.
I wonder if the RIAA has done any public image surveys since they decided to start terrorizing their consumers? It's one thing to try to protect your intellectual property; it's another thing entirely to shake down every person with an internet connection. I can't think of one person nowadays who thinks the record industry is anything but a pack of devils; I just wish there was some way of translating that revulsion into serious market reform. They're just jackals, plain and simple.
Speaking as someone who's married to a reporter, and who works at a "local" news outlet, the publicity can only be worse from trying to localize their lawsuits. The media outlets will pick it up, and talk to the person, who'll act bewildered and put upon, and then talk to their neighbors who'll be indignant and offended, and then wrap up with a public official saying "Well, it's a law, but we don't really hold with big national corporations poking their noses into our business, and really they're pencil dicks anyway."
That's the thing with national news...They talk to national people. Some Senator or Representative who really needs RIAA money for his next election. But local news, you're talking to elected officials who probably won their office by a few thousand votes at best, about people who live right down the street. Make it local, you make it personal, and people will take it personally.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The MPAA most certainly does. For example: 20th Century Fox is part of http://www.newscorp.com/operations/other.html which owns the NY Post, The Sun and the Times in the UK, and many many many more news outlets all over the world. There is not a snowball's chance in Hell of getting negative publicity over any MPAA action in a News Corp media business.
And so on with Time Warner and the rest...
While they are not the RIAA per se - there are connections between all these players, and a joint vested interest.
I guess you are either flamebaiting or you must work for the RIAA -- anyone who pays attention to the world knows that the RIAA is a pile of garbage. Just look into some of the crap that they've done (hint: the article summary had 3 cases where the RIAA was playing the role of a tool).
Going after 12 year olds for "violating" intellectual property rights is bullshit -- when was the last time you asked a 12 year old about intellectual property rights and got any answer other than a headscratch and a "huh?".
Telling a 15 year old she has to lie in court otherwise she will be tried for perjury is not only unethical but brutal. If you're religious, placing your hand on the bible and swearing to go that you're telling the truth and then having to lie because the RIAA told you to is "just protecting intellectual copyright"?
Suing a woman who has never used a computer in her life... doesn't that just scream "I'm the RIAA and I don't look into things before I try to ruin peoples' lives by suing them into the poorhouse"?
They're NOT protecting the artists that they suppossedly represent (via the record companies that they represent):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riaa
"In 1999, Stanley M. Glazier, a Congressional staff attorney, inserted, without public notice or comment, substantive language into the final markup of a "technical corrections" section of copyright legislation, classifying many music recordings as "works made for hire," thereby stripping artists of their copyright interests and transferring those interests to their record labels. Shortly afterwards, Glazier was hired as Senior Vice President of Government Relations and Legislative Counsel for the RIAA, which vigorously defended the change when it came to light. The battle over the disputed provision led to the formation of the Recording Artists' Coalition, which successfully lobbied for repeal of the change."
"In 2006, the RIAA claimed that ripping CDs and backing them up does not constitute fair use, because tracks from ripped CDs do not maintain the controversial DRM to protect the music file from copyright infringement. They argue that, there is no evidence that any of the relevant media are "unusually subject to damage" and that "even if CDs do become damaged, replacements are readily available at affordable prices.""
That's right, they want you to buy a new CD when yours breaks... after all, they're "unusually subject to damage", right? Those thing pieces of plastic scratch more easily than my ass! Ripping the CD to my computer (and not sharing it) is not fair use? They don't want me putting it on my mp3 player so I can take my 800+ CD collection wherever I want without hiring a personal music assistant? Damn, well I guess I could employ one of the people the RIAA sued into the ground for pretty cheap. By the way, about 20 of those cds no longer work due to scratches, thankfully I have all my music ripped to my computer so I was able to burn myself a backed up copy -- I store all my cds in the cases they come in or in proteced and padded cd booklets so it's not like I'm mishandling them.
The RIAA is not in the interest of protecting rights of the artist or the consumer -- they're in the interest of making themselves rich and powerful.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
The problem is the definition of stealing. Traditionally, stealing always meant intentionally and permanently depriving someone of their property. This was later extended to cover situations where you deprive someone of a service, or where you don't permanently deprive someone of property but you deprive them of it for long enough to render it useless (i.e. taking someone's concert ticket and giving it back after the concert has gone ahead).
In no sense of the word can it be said that anyone here is being deprived of anything. A digital copy leaves the original completely intact. Of course, **AA argue that every single copy equals a lost sale. They would, wouldn't they? But this is blatantly ridiculous. There are far too many people who hoard music/movies - they couldn't have afforded to buy them all even if they wanted to. The truth is that a very tiny portion of those people who download would have bought the item if they hadn't downloaded (and a number of those people buy the item anyway, after they've tried it).
Downloading is just a convenience to most people. It's easier for me to download an album/movie and spend an hour listening to/watching it than it is for me to research what's worth buying. If I like it enough that I'll get more mileage out of it than the initial look, I'll buy it anyway. If there were no downloads I wouldn't buy any crap that came out, I'd do lots of research to see which were worth my limited fiscal resources. I'd waste a lot of my free time in doing so, but meh, I'd be more happy burning through time than I would money.
The real criminals are those who sell pirated items. Their customers have proven that they would be willing to buy (at the right price) the content and as such it's easier to make a case for a lost sale. Not all of them would be lost sales of course, most people would rather pay £5 for a movie AND see it at the same time as it's released in the cinema than wait 6-12 months and pay £20. But they are at least demonstrating that they're willing to pay some amount for that copy - thus the guy selling it is depriving the copyright holder of a sale, arguably stealing in the process.
Do we see the **AA/governments/police stamping out these resellers? Well, to a tiny extent. But for the most part they're going after casual downloaders. Why is this, if the real "thieves" are getting away with it? Because the real argument isn't about theft, it never was. It's about control. **AA want it and the internet has done a pretty good job of eroding it. So they attack downloaders, try to make us fear the tool that will remove their control, push for laws to control how we use content we've paid for. In essence they're trying to limit our rights in regards to our own legally purchased content - to me THEY are the real thieves in all of this. Just ask the artists, who also get royally screwed...
Yes, very insightful. You've come very close to the real issue, here. See, when CDs came out (never mind the promises about the prices coming down - they never did), everybody started re-buying albums that they already had to get the CD version. (How many copies has "Dark Side of the Moon" sold again?) So many people paid for the same music twice.
The next format was the DVD-Audio, but that never really caught on. So the next market was the iPod and on-line music. Well, guess what? I can just rip my CD's to populate my iPod. "NOOOOO! We can't allow that!" Too late now, the genie is out of the bottle. But that doesn't stop the greed.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia