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RIAA Goes for the Max Against AllofMP3
Spad writes "Zeropaid is reporting that as part of its ongoing lawsuit, the RIAA will be seeking the maximum of $150,000 per song for each of the 11 million MP3s downloaded from the Russian AllofMP3.com between June and October last year. This amounts to roughly $1.65 trillion, probably a tad more than AllofMP3 has made in its lifetime. A representative of AllofMP3 stated: 'AllofMP3 understands that several U.S. record label companies filed a lawsuit against Media Services in New York. This suit is unjustified as AllofMP3 does not operate in New York. Certainly the labels are free to file any suit they wish, despite knowing full well that AllofMP3 operates legally in Russia. In the mean time, AllofMP3 plans to continue to operate legally and comply with all Russian laws.'"
Why sue for a trillion, when you can sue for... a million?
got sig?
Let's see how many RIAA people come down with an acute case of radiation sickness. In Russia, the competition comes after you!
$1.65trillion is a fair bit more than the GDP of Russia as a whole.
How fucking ludicrous and excessive. Jesus.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
AllofMp3 offers 20% bonus untill January 14, 2007
Russia's yearly gross domestic product is $1.576 trillion. RIAA's claim is little more than that, $1.65 trillion.
I'm all for allofmymp3 and all of it's Russian counterparts. I lost my entire cd and record collection in Katrina and it was the only was to recover my collection instead of repurchasing all of the albums again.
I am old enough to have bought my entire collection on records, tapes, cd's and for as much as I can SACD/HD audio. I am all for contributing to the machine if the records companies release NEW, higher quality recordings in the future, but I'm not repurchasing my cd collection. I've already paid my taxes to the RIAA Gods several times over.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
Where do they get these numbers? This is over 10% of the GDP of the USA, and 333 times the amount gross retail music sales in 2005. I wonder if the US court will take this companies .com domains.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_music_market
THEIR SUING POWER IS OVER NINE THOUSAND!!!
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Indeed. According to the RIAA's stats: http://www.riaa.com/news/newsletter/pdf/2005yrEndS tats.pdf (warning: PDF), the total industry is something on the order of 12 billion $US per year. How can they claim with a straight face that the *damages* are about 100 times greater than the size of the industry being damaged?
As you said, I hope this gets publicized because it really demonstrates how ridiculous the dollar value associated with infringement really is.
Surely the "R" doesn't stand for "Recording". Must be for "Racketeering"
The Racketeering Industry Association of America. Thats more like it.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
but the artists dont get *shit* when you buy your music there.
4 495
Because artists make SO MUCH on sales in this country...
(Don't particularly like using this as a reference, it's not exactly CNN or BBC, but it's the first reference I saw that looked decent...)
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=1
Rather than paying artists approximately 30 cents of the 70 cents it receives for digital downloads (after deducting payments to music publishers), the suit alleges that Sony Music treats each download as a sale of a physical CD or cassette tape, only paying on 85 per cent of such "sales" (due to a fiction that there is breakage of product), deducting a further 20 per cent fee for container/packaging charges associated with the digital downloads (although there are none), and reducing its payments by a further 50 per cent "audiofile" deduction, yielding a payment to the Sony Music recording artists of approximately 4 1/2 cents per digital download
I'd rather pirate the track and give the artist the buck directly. If only there were a way to do that...
I'm not a big fan of the RIAA, but I'm also not a big fan of AllofMP3. Yes, it's legal in Russia (through a loophole in radio licensing they're trying to close), but not here in the US.
Let me get this straight. When a company moves its manufacturing division from the U.S. to Malaysia to take advantage of the industry-friendly labour laws in that country, they're applauded for their ingenuity. On the other hand, when U.S. consumers take advantage of consumer-friendly copyright laws overseas, they're criminals.
American corporations love doing business in countries where labor laws are lax. They do business where labor laws are lax because they can work people there in ways that would be illegal to do so in the United States. The corporations would call this "globalization" and point the great benefits of the "global economy" at work.
American corporations also like to do business in countries where organized dissent to their activities is suppressed by "friendly" governments (friendly to their interests, that is). They do so because organized dissent is legal in the United States and has on more than one occasion 1) aired the corp's dirty laundry, 2) stopped them from performing harmful (but profitable) acts, and 3) called for the corp's to strike a balance between shareholder value and respect for the laws of the country in which they live.
What does all of this have to do with AllOfMP3? Well, American corporations have a long record of doing business (and making bundles of money) by going to places where they aren't restrained by such trite formalities as "laws". American corporations love to extol the virtues of the "global economy", just as long as they're the ones who benefit from it; after all, transnational capital alone should benefit from international business.
But for some reason, the average Joe using the internet to do THE EXACT SAME THING that American corporations have been doing for years is deemed wrong, illegal, unethical, and Lord knows how many other bad things. The average Joe who buys a song from AllOfMP3 is engaging in exactly the same type of transaction that corp's have done for years: gain financial advantage by offshoring their transactions.
Am I oversimplifying? Maybe. But chew on this: Either we have a global market (as we are told that we have as our jobs are outsourced), or we don't. And if we do have a global market, the rules were written long ago by the same people that are trying to stop us from following them.
Governments are not necessary.
They may win this war, but its the wrong war. They may yet be retarded enough to lose the REAL war.
I currently do not let my son download music illegally. He is allowed to buy off of iTunes with prepaid cards, and cannot use bittorrent, or any other p2p. Now I know someday, he'll be able to use these without my knowledge and thats fine. But what I'm doing is explaining to him why leagally obtaining music is the right thing to do. I also however expalain in detail that the RIAA is possibly the largest bunch of idiotic half wits on the entire planet. My eplaination basiclly goes "iTunes uses DRM at the behest of the music industry, but its not too invasive and can be removed simply by burning a CD and reimporting (lossy I know), but it doesn't bind the user too much and the price is reasonable (unlike Apples movies which we won't buy)". I also tell him that iTunes would lose every cent of our business if someone started selling unDRMed mp3s for the same (or lower price). Now allofmp3.com fits that bill but as this story shows, their legality is in question. But the RIAA is overplaying its hand!! (Sorry I'm going to yell and swear now, but can't help it). Those fucking bastards keep going after allofmp3, keep pressuring Apple to raise prices, and keep trying to get other sites with even worse DRM than fairplay fired up!! Dammit RIAA all you have to do to win the entire fucking market and make these same billions of dollars you sue everyone for is OFFER FUCKING DRM FREE MUSIC FROM YOUR OWN SITES AT THE PRICE APPLE HAS ALREADY DETERMINED WILL WORK!!!!! I mean I could steal everything for just a little bit more effort than buying from iTunes. I don't, I try to do whats right, but my patience is wearing thin, very thin.
This is a warning to the RIAA, keep this shit up and you'll make it way to easy for everyone to justify stealing from you because you are just too fucking evil. And I'll tell my son stealing from you is ok too because an group of soulless, vile, repugnant, people like you don't deserve any of our money or our respect.
Fuck, you fucking people are giving me a brain haemorrhage with this shit.
Works are fixed in media (see 17 USC 101). These media are called copies. So music and software are fixed on CDs and DVDs (and harddrives and RAM), and novels are fixed in hardcover books, etc.
When you buy a CD, you buy a CD. Period.
When you buy a book, you buy a book. Period.
You can lend your book, your CD, to someone. You can rent it. You can sell it. You can burn it. Etc.
You do not buy, and do not need, a license for the work on the media unless you plan to do something with that work that would violate the copyright holder's exclusive rights (see 17 USC 106).
THERE ARE NO EULAs FOR CDs OR DVDs.
You are buying media. Period.
You have to understand that. You can do anything with the media you want. That doesn't entitle you to the "work." The work is an intangible thing. It is unownable and unpossessable and therefore nobody owns nor possesses it.
Copyright grants copyright holders certain rights assoicated with the work -- FROM WHATEVER SOURCE -- but this is separate from the work fixed in a medium: which is a physical thing, just like any other physical thing.
The reason you can't do whatever you want (eg, make copies) is because the copyright statute says you can't. It's not because a license says you can't. You need a license in order to make copies*, sure, but you're not buying one when you buy a CD.
* you can also make copies if you have one of the few exceptions under the law, etc.
If you're allowed to make backups, btw (about which there is no brightline rule, only the fair use test), you're allowed to keep them when you resell your CD, etc. But since there's no general exception to make backups generally (software is an exception IIRC), the whole circumstances have to fit the four factors of the fair use test. So, e.g., if you intended to sell your CD, and made a backup so you could keep the music knowing you planned to sell it tomorrow, that's probably not a fair use.
Please also inform your son about the difference between theft and copyright infringement.