Motley Fool Says RIAA Hitting a Brick Wall

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Motley Fool business site says that the RIAA's litigation campaign is in the end game. Monday it reported that 'the music industry's lawsuit crusade against defenseless college students and housewives appears to have hit the skids,' predicting that the RIAA's tactics are 'all about to change.' Today the Fool confirms that 'the change is happening in Internet time, which is somewhere between "instantly" and "yesterday,"' noting that the RIAA's abandonment of its 'making available' theory shows that the end is near. And this is before the RIAA faces its first jury trial, set to begin Oct. 2 in Duluth."

Comments

Re:Motley Fool... RIAA

[Manuscript Replica]

Hey! We're capital-F Fools, which is totally different from the foolishness of the RIAA. :)

Way to go RIAA

[suv4x4]

Before RIAA did anything about it, we all doubted what we're doing with music torrents is illegal and may get us in trouble.

Now, RIAA, after many years and millions of USD working on the issue, confirmed it's in fact perfectly safe for us to carry on.

Thank you, RIAA!

Re:Way to go RIAA

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not thanking them.

I have friends in bands, with CDs, none of who would be caught dead with an RIAA label contract. The biggest fools are those foolish enough to sign with a major label. See Courtney Love Does The Math, among other articles, none of which paint a very rosy picture of the monsters who run the labels.

These guys, like every other artist, WANT their music to be heard. They will be more than happy to let you serve MP3s from eDonkey or Kazaa. P2P and internet radio are all the indies have.

Meanwhile, the RIAA lies about Piracy, when in fact if you want far better quality copies of each and every top 40 song there is, all you have to do is tune your radio to a top-40 station, plug it into your computer and sample it for a couple of hours, then spend 10 minutes editing. Far easier and less time consuming even than iTunes, with better quality rips! But the RIAA labels control what goes on the radio; they can keep indies off. What they can't control is internet radio, which they have effectively killed, and P2P, which they are trying desperately to kill.

At the risk of repeating myself (better than not getting the point through), this is about crushing the cartel's independant competetion, not about "piracy". Yes, P2P costs them sales - but not because you won't buy that Britney Spears CD after downloading all the songs. It's because after you buy those four indie CDs by that band you found on P2P or internet radio for five bucks apiece, you no longer have the twenty to buy Britney's drek. If you like it, you'll buy it, and only a fool or a damned thief would believe otherwise.

-mcgrew

Unlikely

[Zelocka]

The legal team they have may be moving away and pretty much trying to give up the strategy, but there is no way the record company business management is going to drop it. They have too much of a since of entitlement over making unlimited amounts of money off the same music forever.

It's much more likely you will see the experienced members of the legal team quietly move out to other jobs and new inexperienced members will come in and do the same failed strategy as before.

If it was going to end, we would have seen some level of common since out of the RIAA by now either dropping music prices drastically and providing consistent DRM free music. Drastic price reduction is the only way they are going to cut piracy and that is something they will never do. They are spoiled with years of charging insane amounts of money for something that typically costs them nothing or next to nothing. They are not going to change there thinking until they lose most of the new music being recorded to other venues.

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[account_deleted]

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They've created a pirate culture

[astrashe]

The Motley Fool points out that most people are honest, and want to pay for their music, so long as they can get what they want.

I think that's mostly true, but that it's far less true than it would have been if the industry had pursued different polices over the past several years.

There's a whole generation out there now that's grown up with piracy, and that's totally comfortable with it. Because this fight has polarized people so much, it's pushed a lot of people into the pro-piracy side who wouldn't have been there otherwise.

Re:They've created a pirate culture

[david_thornley]

Yup. Why would somebody pay for music when they can get it for free?

• They could be paying for a better copy, but in fact the pirate copies are better. (No DRM, for starters.)
• They could be paying because it's the right thing to do, but the prosecutions are firmly establishing the labels as the bad guys, and it's really hard to sell morality when you're running a campaign of indiscriminate terror.
• They could be paying because they're scared of the RIAA, but the RIAA's tactics are increasingly seen as ineffective.
• They could be paying to support the artists, but I suspect increasing numbers of people are aware of how much money the artists actually see from the CDs.
• They aren't going to be swayed by annoying ham-handed messages that try to make law-abiding customers feel like criminals, not in a culture where Reefer Madness became something of a cult hit.

The RIAA seems to be meticulously removing any reason anybody would have for buying their stuff. It's worse than watching the business practices of Major League Baseball. It's fascinating, much like a ship having a disagreement with an iceberg.

(Yes, all my music has been acquired legally. Why do you ask?)

And we should care why?

[PhysicsPhil]

I am a big fan of the Motley Fool website, but these guys are an "investment website", which really means they're simultaneous trying to attract readers to entertain them and hopefully sell their various investment newsletters. Generally I think they have a fair bit of credibility, focusing on things like investing over a decade-long time horizon, not piling into the "next big thing" and watching things like mutual fund expenses.

That being said, I'm not sure why we particularly care about this particular article, other than the fact that it parrots the party line here at Slashdot. These guys aren't lawyers, and don't spend a lot of time examining the recording industry. In fact, over the 7 years that I've been reading their articles, this is the *only* one I can recall that discusses the music industry at all. It strikes me very much as an op-ed piece rather than a serious legal or business study of an industry, and I don't give it any more credibility than some guy ranting on his blog.

To be sure, the RIAA has suffered legal defeats and setbacks, but just because a financial news and opinion site happens to pick up on it does not mean that the industry is going to collapse, nor does it mean that those who are being/will be sued should stop worrying.

Re:And we should care why?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

I am a big fan of the Motley Fool website, but these guys are an "investment website", which really means they're simultaneous trying to attract readers to entertain them and hopefully sell their various investment newsletters. Generally I think they have a fair bit of credibility, focusing on things like investing over a decade-long time horizon, not piling into the "next big thing" and watching things like mutual fund expenses. That being said, I'm not sure why we particularly care about this particular article, other than the fact that it parrots the party line here at Slashdot. These guys aren't lawyers, and don't spend a lot of time examining the recording industry. In fact, over the 7 years that I've been reading their articles, this is the *only* one I can recall that discusses the music industry at all. It strikes me very much as an op-ed piece rather than a serious legal or business study of an industry, and I don't give it any more credibility than some guy ranting on his blog. To be sure, the RIAA has suffered legal defeats and setbacks, but just because a financial news and opinion site happens to pick up on it does not mean that the industry is going to collapse, nor does it mean that those who are being/will be sued should stop worrying.

Here's why I care.

The fact that an investment web site like Motley Fool and a business program like "MarketPlace" (which just did a 3-part series last week on the record industry's grand mistake) take hold of the issue isn't necessarily of interest from a legal point of view or a scientific point of view, but it is of great interest to shareholders and would be shareholders.

The impetus for dropping this campaign won't come from
-the lawyers who have been the principal beneficiaries of this juggernaut,
-techies,
-the entrenched management who would never admit to their shareholders that they've been on a fool's errand for the past 4 1/2 years,
-the RIAA which has been destroying the record companies, or
-anyone else.

It will come from shareholders when they come to realize they are being taken for a ride by a handful of morons who were too dumb to (a) realize the business opportunity the internet represented for them until it was too late, and/or (b) create a new business model that could harness the internet's energy.

The investment community is coming to realize that the big 4 record companies stocks -- all referred to in the Motley Fools articles -- won't be worth a damn until the record companies leave the past, enter the present, and work to survive into the future.

That's why the article means something.

PS As a lawyer, I think the Motley Fool author's understanding of the legal issues was pretty good, certainly a lot better than that of the RIAA lawyers I've met.

Re:Precedent

[Aladrin]

IANAL.

No, they don't 'have' to be heard by jury, but the judge will take it into consideration that another case did.

And there's been a couple cases later that don't fit your 2 patterns:

RIAA: ZOMG PIRACY! YOU GETTIN' SUED, FOO!
Plaintiff: What? Fsck that! We're going to court!
Judge: Court is now in session.
Judge: I'm dropping the case, because your scare tactics have no legal merit. You'll also pay the defendent and their lawyer a lot of money.

Re:Scare tactic

[jeffasselin]

Some of us also understand that the sharing of ideas and of artistic production is more important to our culture and civilization than whether or not rich guy makes 3 millions or 4 millions next year. Some of us live in a country where sharing such media is actually legal if done for personal use.

Re:Scare tactic

[TemporalBeing]

If they win, and they will, the Copyright Age will be seen as nothing more than a very small period of time sandwiched between the two huge Copyrightless Ages: the one that existed before, and the one that is starting right now.

First, read my other comment in this topic as I address some points there, but don't want to repost the entire thing here, and this is especially relevant to your statement quoted above.

If you want a simple example, here's the historical one. Since the beginning of recorded history up until the first half of the Modern Age, the copying was considered by EVERYONE, from writers to actors, from musicians to singers, from inventors to manufacturers, as an obvious right. Libraries, for instance, existed for thousands of years, and beyond allowing you to take a book and read it, they all had full teams of scribes who would copy any work a customer wanted, or, if he so wished, would allow him to do the copy himself. Everyone interested in any intellectual production did this, and everyone felt it was the natural way of things.

Quite true. And the big examples are stage writers such as William Shakespeare. They were paid to write a script for a specific production - they often "borrowed" from each other quite a bit, and sometimes even took whole manuscripts, changed a few things, put their name on it, and sold it off as their own work - even if all they did was change locations of scenes and character names, or nothing at all other than the title.

The big premise here is the "work and get paid; don't work - don't get paid". Unfortunately, it is everyone's natural inclination to try to figure out how to "don't work and still get paid", which is why a lot of people really like copyright and patents, and why they'll fight tooth and nail to make terms longer and more in their favor, as opposed to letting it degenerate into what it was before we had copyright.

I still stand by my other post though, as even if we got everyone to agree that copying anything was okay - just like before we had copyright - I think you'd still find the majority saying "but you have to ensure that the author still gets credit " for all copies of their work. This is much easier to do today worldwide than it was 400 years ago; it was also much easier with the printing press than it was before the printing press for smaller regions (e.g. localities, countries, etc.).

And, as I pointed out in my other post - this is essentially what Open Source Licenses basically seek out to do. No matter how they differ in details of distribution, modification, etc - they all require attribution to the original author remains intact.

Re:Scare tactic

[Artifakt]

I hate to keep making this point on RIAA threads but...

I ran an electronics service business out of a white ford van for a while. One night a drunk driver totaled it, and was actually caught. I was legally able to sue him for 3x damages, because he committed DUI and Hit and Run, both criminal acts, and so punitive damages were allowed on the civil side. (I ended up getting almost exactly what it cost me to actually replace everything, but that was more than what I could really prove in court he had destroyed, and replacement costs on all the ruined equipment were higher than the original costs, so 'punitive' damage rules helped get actual justice).

The RIAA is using a law that gives them a 5x damages rule (it multiplies a 30,000$ damage cap to 150,000$ if a test is met - that's 5x). The only have to prove the violation was 'willful' to get that multiple. The standard to prove willfullness is much, much easier than the standard I needed to justify 3x damages.

This is a matter of fundamental equality. Even if I was sure the people running torrents and such are doing severe damage to the RIAA members, even if it is every bit as costly as the RIAA claims, getting special laws passed that make everyone else effectively second tier in court is a damage to the whole legal system. I can't support the RIAA's actions unless they are subject to the same rules as the rest of us. I'm not sure how anyone else can.