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:They've created a pirate culture

[Mongoose Disciple]

That's a really interesting point. I wonder if we'll be talking about this era of record company business in fifty years the same way people say that the alcohol prohibition era in the U.S. gave organized crime its first big growth.

Re:Scare tactic

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

I think the real issue here is the RIAA's inability to see that the whole idea is a bad business move. I agree. When an investment site like Motley Fool gets hold of it, that should tell the shareholders something. Also, NPR's business show, "Marketplace", did an excellent 3- part series last week on the wrongheadedness of the RIAA's litigation campaign, and of alternative business models it should be exploring instead.

Re:Scare tactic

[porcupine8]

Even if you understand that it's wrong and agree that the RIAA should be compensated when they do sue someone who is guilty, that doesn't mean you agree that they're asking for reasonable compensation. $750 per song? Do you really think that every time a person puts a song in their shared folder, they deprive the RIAA of an average of 750 legal downloads? Particularly if no one has to have ever downloaded the song from you to get sued?

If they were asking for $5 or $10 a song - and being more careful about who they sued - sure there'd still be some people claiming they should never ever sue anyone, but I think many people would be at least a little more sympathetic. At least I'd only think they were being silly and self-destructive for clinging to an outdated business model, rather than seeing them as extortionists and fear-mongerers. And given that they're settling for $3000, you can't tell me that they actually need the whole $750/song for legal fees, etc. They use it as a scare tactic, plain and simple, so they can get their $3k with no fuss and muss.

Re:Scare tactic

[alexgieg]

One should not need to agree, that such copying amounts to theft, to understand, that it is wrong regardless.

Not really. I myself was a VERY strong opponent of copyright infringement until ten years ago. I only changed my mind after I got hold of economics studies, more specifically in the classic liberal (not the US-kind of social liberalism) and libertarian traditions, then advanced into the realm of political theory.

There are A LOT of arguments out there against copyright and patents, ranging from the economic to the historical, from the social to the political, and dismissing all of this on the basis that "copying is obviously wrong" amounts to nothing more than a very crude oversimplification.

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.

It was only half-way through the Modern Age, and at first only in certain regions on Europe, that thing started to change. It took centuries, literally, for our system of "copying rights" to develop and turn in 180 degrees how we handled the subject. And while many industries organized and flourished around and from this system, it never, ever, ceased feeling unnatural to those taking contact with it for the first time.

What the Internet, and the "pirates" in it, are doing, thus, isn't so much contrary to the way things ought to be, but quite the opposite, a return to way things always were. A way that was artificially twisted 400 or so years ago, but is now being slowly and painfully put straight again. In this matter, they're surely a bunch of very conservative old-timers as one rarely sees. ;-)

If this is the case, how can they be "wrong"? They're "wrong" only from the very limited perspective of a limited subset of modernity and most of the contemporaneity. From the perspective of the (25 times longer) Ancient and Medieval worlds, their actions are pure common sense.

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.

The faster the "progressive" copyright-defenders accept this, the better. For everyone.