RIAA Wins Worst Company In America 2007

An anonymous reader writes "After 15 punishing rounds of combat involving 32 of America's most hated companies, 100,000 voters have spoken: More hated than Halliburton, more despised than Walmart, the RIAA has defeated all comers to become the Worst Company in America 2007."

Comments

I Demand a Recount

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, just in case RIAA demands a recount, I've selected the final 8, and added 2 from the final 16 that were "close calls."

This is a poll:
Worst Company In America - 2007

Verizon
U-Haul
Sony
Exxon
Clear Channel
Halliburton
RIAA
Walmart
Comcast
Best Buy

Re:Since when is the RIAA a company?

[TheDreadSlashdotterD]

Yeah, a company.

This isn't a win for us

[KKlaus]

It's not Sony BMG, Warner, etc at the top of the list, it's their front group the RIAA. People hate the RIAA? Guess what, that's exactly what it was created with in mind. Recording companies get to engage in strong-armed consumer-alienating behavior, but dodge the consequences because the "RIAA" is there to take the flak.

So don't call this a victory for us! This is a victory for the record companies, because it shows that they have successfully redirected your wrath to a "company" (I don't know why the summary uses that word) that doesn't have a product, and could care less that you don't like them.

Trade Group Not Company

[aldheorte]

The RIAA is a trade group, not a company, although I have long wondered why they do not run afoul of anti-trust laws since they essentially serve as a vehicle for price fixing, joint litigation, and other forms of collusion between the member companies, which, taken together, represent a de facto monopoly in the music industry.

And the prize is...

[lavid]

The RIAA will get a gift certificate for 100 song downloads at the iTunes store!

Re:Since when is the RIAA a company?

[bigstrat2003]

No, they're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. They take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting.

Re:Results may already be dated.

[grommit]

It wasn't. If you bothered to click on the link in the summary and scanned down the page a bit, you would have seen the message about Halliburton moving it's HQ to Dubai just before Round 13.

Unrelated to your post but I'm too lazy to create another post of my own: It's funny how 100,000+ voteS in the actual article turns into 100,000+ voteRS in the Slashdot summary. It seems that the highest number of individual voters in any single round was around 23,000. That's a pretty small sample size but considering that the people who frequent The Consumerist seem to be at least a bit more educated about consumer issues than your regular joe perhaps these votes count for a bit more than a poll that reached more people and got more numbers.

It's "most hated" not "most evil"

[Xenographic]

> the riaa is just trying to protect its intellectual property.

No, they're not "just" trying to do that. They've manipulated the law to their own ends and complain whenever people decry that as unfair. They sue innocent people, attempting to ruin their lives. And if they do find out that someone's innocent, they use discovery to invade the innocent person's life, looking to find the real infringer. Which might well be them, after they have MediaSentry flood the P2P networks with bogus files and bogus search data (including the very searches they use to find "infringers"!) And if you insist upon corruption, just what do you call payola? Are bribes not considered corruption these days, or what?

Now, don't get me wrong--Halliburton isn't exactly some nice company, either. But this is "most hated" not "most evil" and the RIAA has gotten a lot more press lately.

But please, don't say they're "just" trying to protect their "property" because there's no way in hell I'll buy that lame excuse.

Re:stolen music vs corruption

[Dun Malg]

if you think about it, the riaa is just trying to protect its intellectual property. See, the problem here is that it isn't their "property". Songs, stories, movies--- once they're publicly released, they belong to all of us. Copyright is an artificial, government created, temporary, limited monopoly on the right to copy these artifacts of our common culture. The fact that the thieving bastards have greased the collective palm of congress to obtain perpetual extensions to the temporary monopoly on copying doesn't change the fact that all that stuff is ours. If you actually educate yourself on the long history of artistic creation and the short history of copyright, you'd understand what an absolute evil is being perpetrated upon us by the bastards claiming ownership of this stuff--- and you'd likely no longer parrot the their "intellectual property" fallacy.

Re:comcast

[MetalPhalanx]

When I went to move out of the previous apartment I lived in, I rented a Uhaul truck. We arranged the details two weeks in advance, and they promised it would be set up.

When my parents arrived at the uhaul rental place to pick up our large truck, they had none on the lot, and informed us that the nearest one was roughly 200km away, in the opposite direction from where I needed to go. They offered us a trailer that was 1/3rd the size as the best they could do.

So here I am on moving day, with nowhere to store my stuff, no truck to put it in, and no other options. By a strange fluke of luck I managed to get the landlord of my new apartment let me move in a day early, and we just ferried it over.

I'd say that's why Uhaul is worse. If Best Buy fucks up, you just have to wait a little while longer (I'm sure someone will have a story to prove me wrong, but whatever). But if Uhaul fucks you around on moving day, you're boned.

Re:Since when is the RIAA a company?

[Dun Malg]

The RIAA isn't a company. It's a trade association. An arbitrary distinction. They are incorporated in New York, so they are as much a corporation as any other. The fact that their entire customer base consists of a small clique of recording industry companies is wholly irrelevant. They are merely the non-profit* collective "beard" of their members, allowing them to pawn off their dirty work on a faceless third party.

* their lobbying efforts alone make their non-profit status pretty hard to justify under 501(c)(3)

Re:Since when is the RIAA a company?

[Red Flayer]

* their lobbying efforts alone make their non-profit status pretty hard to justify under 501(c)(3)

But they are not registered as a 501(c)3.

501(c)3 is a designation for non-profits to whom personal donations are tax-deductible; there are many, many non-profits that do not fall under this category. Under federal tax law, a business may still deduct donations to a lobbying non-profit as business expenses, if the lobbying is in support of the business interests of the business -- personal contributions, however, aren't exempt.

Yet another way the corporations and their crony legislators have reinforced their domination of the legislative process.

The hypocrisy of the MPAA/RIAA

[BillGatesLoveChild]

> the riaa is just trying to protect its intellectual property.

The problem is that IP laws have been so twisted by lobbyists and big business. They seek to profit by taking away our rights. We are supposed to have rights to fair use, fair pricing, and things entering the public domain in a reasonable period, and the artists receiving a fair deal.

But when Mickey Mouse was supposed to enter the public domain, Disney went to the politicans so firmly in their pocket and got them to change the way. Same for the public domain period which congress just keeps setting back and back and back. And the DMCA which was a rights grab and now I can't even watch a DVD I purchased in another country without breaking the law. Some anime series are overpriced: the maker puts 5 episodes on the first DVD, whittling it down to 2 episodes (on a $30 DVD) on the last. Yet this is legal. And while the MPAA and the RIAA hiss and spit about how they're only protecting the authors' rights, they use Hollywood Accounting to rob those very same artists blind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting And look a the tactics the RIAA shareholders have used to steal royalties off music artists. Recently when someone submitting a movie to the MPAA for ratings, the MPAA made and distributed copies against their wishes, and the court found the MPAA could do what it wants. Their hypocrisy is staggering. We have the absurdity of Adobe, who engineered an incompetant encryption scheme, using the DMCA to throw the guy who exposed them into jail. The DMCA means Macrovision is now by law built into every video device, with the result that my old color TV can't watch new videos. In Australia Channel 9 was fiddling with their digital feed to stop people from copying shows, with the results digital TV sets across the country kept locking up. http://www.smh.com.au/news/home-theatre/case-of-th e-csi-lg-tv-freeze-cracked/2007/03/21/117415312601 5.html
The pendulum has clearly swung too far.

Orson Scott Card (Author of "Ender's Game") wrote an excellent essay on this:

http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2003-09-07-1 .html
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2003-09-14-1 .html

With today's Internet in place, the RIAA and MPAA and their moneyed up masters would have never come into existence. They're a cartel living off an old business model, with duplicitous congressmen with bulging pockets changing the law at their beckoned call. If you want to know which congressmen have supported it and which ones have fought it, start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA

Re:comcast

[Loconut1389]

that- or they stick you with an 80's heap that guzzles down gas like beer and gets about 4MPG when you're making 3, 100 mile roundtrips (200 miles total per trip). My gas bill was terrible. In their defense, they did refund me most of the rental after showing my gas bills, but it still was not a pleasurable experience.

I got my revenge on moving day a few years later- I was renting a 26 foot monster and despite them promising me an automatic, I got a manual (never drive one). Being studious, I understand the mechanics of a manual and figured a few minutes in the parking lot (or perhaps an hour) and I'd have it down. I didn't know of course that when you start the thing, there's no park and they often leave it in gear to keep it from rolling in the lot- so when I tried to start it up to do a pre-trip (I leaned in from the side), as the engine started cranking, it shot back into the truck behind. It did minimal damage, so they let it go and sent me out of there with an automatic, albeit smaller. Things went well from there, but the bigger truck would have been helpful. Anyway, the point is, they pulled the same trick on me and it caused an accident.

Re:Since when is the RIAA a company?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. They take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting.

Artists: Help help, I'm being repressed.

Lawsuit victims: Ah, now you see the violence inherent in the system!

Re:stolen music vs corruption

[Anthony Boyd]

Dun Malg, I love you. I basically created an entire Web site to say what you just said. People like you are VERY rare. My wife read the site and said, "but you're a writer, how can you want people to copy your stuff?" And I thought, wow, if my own wife totally misses the point -- a wife who is technology-friendly and talks with me about this stuff regularly -- then LOTS of people are out of touch with the ideas behind copyright. Here's to you, Dun Malg.

Re:comcast

[BlueTrin]

I am looking for +1 revenge in the moderation combobox ...

They won't - the RIAA won

[Alioth]

The RIAA doesn't care if they are voted the 'worst company' - they have succeeded. Since they don't sell anything to the public, the fact that all the hatred has stuck to the RIAA _instead_ of the companies they represent, they have succeeded entirely in this goal - and I predict most people are too blind to this fact to see that this is anything other than an extremely hollow victory. The RIAA doesn't care if they are unpopular with the general public - because the general public is not their customer. So long as the hate and bile sticks to them, instead of the record companies they represent - they are winning.

Re:stolen music vs corruption

[ScrewMaster]

Well, according to Thomas Jefferson, all copyright is a loan from the public domain. We do own all published creative works, it's just that the copyright holder is the only one allowed to profit by them for a while. Jefferson actually did not want copyrights (or patents, for that matter) because he felt that such would ultimately damage the public domain. As usual he was right.

We really should listen the Founders more often.