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White House Lauds MN RIAA Win, Analysis of Victory
cnet-declan writes "The Bush administration's copyright czar says the RIAA's $222,000 recent jury verdict against a Minnesota woman shows copyright law is 'effective' and working as planned. C|Net's coverage has comments from Chris Israel, the U.S. Coordinator for International Intellectual Property Enforcement. Israel is formerly a senior Commerce Department official appointed by President Bush in July 2005 who previously worked for Time Warner's public policy arm (Warner Bros. Records is one of the plaintiffs in the RIAA case). The site also features an interview with Rep. Rick Boucher, no fan of the RIAA, on whether Congress will change the law, an analysis of why U.S. copyright law is broken, and four reasons why the RIAA won."
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:) that is put out there for your consumption. I can't wait for the pendulum to swing back hard. It's already showing some resistance (file sharing and what-not) to being in favor of one side heavily over the other with respect to the original idea of copyright. Some term extensions are fine with me. But the current system of life of the author + 70 years AND digital rights management is obscene and a kick to the crotch of the idea of copyright.
At this point, I kind of get a kick of seeing how the copyright system is thrown in favor of those who are responsible for most of the "content" (not worthy of the term "music" eh?
Why yes I am paranoid! Thanks for asking!
Princess Hacka: The more you tighten your copyrights, the more songs will slip through the P2P nets.
I will be amazed if history does not label him the worst President we have ever had, along with the worst Presidential crew (cabinet and appointees) we have ever had.
The guy and his friends, as a group, have been almost unbelievable. What is even worse, is that on the rebound, a lot of people might actually think that voting for Hillary is a good idea. (shudder)
If you do not know who Ron Paul is, do yourself and others a favor and look him up. But if you really do not think honesty is important, go ahead and vote for any of the others.
Just a question ... are Americans teaching their children that it is good to share, or that it is bad to share?
...its about prolonging the inevitable death of the labels business.
........ no sale.
.. then I won't listen and won't know about artist I might just like enough to buy.
Remove the labels and replace them with a business model that understands the enormous cost savings of technology and the internet for production and distribution.
It should be obvious, even from the court records.
I very rarely buy music and when I do I try to buy directly from the artist, but this does not stop me from lisening to a great deal more music than I have purchased (not rented).
I don't pirate but I have heard mixes others have done that remined me of plenty of songs and artists I liked years ago. But at about that time this RIAA crap started up and I figured I liked the artists and their works, not the contradictory business model of the labels as represented by the RIAA. So of course I dropped the idea of locating the music I heard on such mixes, that I might buy it.
I mean since the Mix was illegal, I wasn't supposed to hear it and certainly in not hearing it I wouldn't be remined of
I don't Pirate nor do I support rabid dogs out to bite th hand that feeds them.
The music industry labels has a history of questionable dealings such as Payola to get radio stations to play.... This sort of thing was determined to be illegal, unfair, etc... But the objective was that of getting coverage.
Now that there is plenty of coverage.... they are complaining... Why? because they are not controlling it, its more open to public choice....
Such controlling bias is not beneficial to but a few artists.
So in the mean time I wake to music I don't pay for, drive to work and back with music I don't pay for and when I get an itch for irish music I tune into livelreland and I don't pay for that either.
In fact I'd say on average over years, the music I listen to is better than 90% music I didn't pay for. And all without pirating. Most of which I wouldn't buy anyways, regardless of the fact that by the time the radio stations stop playing it, I'm sick and tired of it anyway and certainly won't have anything, and I certainly won't allow an illegal mix years later wrongly influence me to go out and buy....
Why buy and why pirate when there is plenty free and legal.....
If they shut down internet radio
Perhaps the Labels should just shut down all radio stations music playing..... That'll save them.
RIAA wants to get $150,000 per infringement. If they nailed only 1/10th of the users on just the eMule network right now, each for a single infringement, they would net far more money than they normally make in a year. How can you seek damages so far removed from reality? RIAA wants us to believe that the $40 billion dollar music industry is the being victimized by eMule users to the tune of $600 billion worth of copyright infringement at any given moment.
+0 Meh
This "copyright czar" Chris Israel should better check his kids' (if he has any) pcs and ipods. The majority of the families in the US are at risk for a similar verdict.
But then of course his risk is quite diminished: the Bush administration has an effective system for preventing that their friends are prosecuted. The time that justice was blind is behind us.
God, that was funny :-).
:-)
Class.
Now, if you really want to kick the industry in the chins it's very easy, but I don't have the time for it.
(1) Register a site "BuynoCDsDay" and put SENSIBLE arguments on there why what the RIAA and the record industry in general is doing is wrong. Talk about the RIAA acting as a second police force, talk about the total absence of rational proof (i.e. lack of evidence) and talk also about alternatives (saying something is bad is easy, offering alternatives is evidence you've been thinking about it)
(2) Plan a day somewhere around Xmas where normally their sales volume is quite high and ask people not to buy a single record that day. Nil, none whatsoever, and to tell their friends as well. Give good arguments (for instance, list the consequences of what happens when the RIAA is allowed to continue abusing the law) and maybe also identify that the RIAA is a primary reason of records being so expensive (here's a question for you - it costs millions to make a movie, yet I can buy a movie DVD for the same money as an album CD, why?). Try to go as wide as possible - get people to translate the site as well because the bigger you make this, the more it will hit.
(3) Market the crap out of this site. Talk to The Register, Slashdot it (which means you'll need to keep to text and small image sizes), get it in Boing Boing, Ars Technica etc, the works. Make promos and stick them on YouTube. In other words, keep hitting it. Email the BBC about what you're doing. Get on the news, annoy your parents with it, come up with a good slogan and yell it everywhere - democracy is being able to say what you think (but without insulting people - ther'e such a thing as good manners).
However, there is ONE thing you should not do. Do not promote illegal activity. Breaking copyright is wrong, whatever your reasons are you have no right to break the law. Just send a signal to the RIAA that the game is up - and this "win" of theirs (which will surely be challenged) will make all those others accused even fight harder (except the dead ones, of course).
So there, instant revolution recipe. I'll go and take my tablets and lie down now
Insert
Ok, this is years back in school. But I do believe there is an ammendment in our constitution stating that "Fines and penalties should be fair and affordable".
Back then they saw the value of using a fine as a means of punishment. The thing is they also saw that you cant issue a fine of $220,000 against a person who makes $30,000 a year. It is unrealistic and unfair.
Though for many politicians making these obscene laws, $220,000 fine to them is like $220 for us everyday people. Their problem is they cant see nor understand what life is like for the vast majority of people in this Earth.
This country needs another Abe Lincoln. A poor man who worked his way up the political ladder. Too bad he'd be filtered out of the system before even starting.
They did that once. 'America', I think they called it.
> Breaking copyright is wrong,
It isn't.
> whatever your reasons are you have no right to break the law.
If the law is unjust, it's not only wrong, but your obligation to break it. If the world worked by your logic, the civilisation would have never developed past the slavery, monarchies, colonialism, and so on, because every of those steps required breaking some kind of then effective, but unjust law. If you didnt ignore, fight and break unjust laws, you wouldnt even live in the US but would be a massively exploited british colony. If you happen to be black, you would still be prohibited from learning something and would have the lagal status of a "thing", could be sold, bought and auctioned, and if youre a woman, youd be prohibited from voting, studying, appearing on streets without a burqa and so on.
FUCKING NOBODY who is not profiting from artificial, enforced scarcity, perceives either this judgement or the underlying copyright fascism as "just" or democratically approved, and without massive civil movements, there seems just to be no way to change the laws, because the persons in power simply "dont allow" the people to do it bacause they know that copyright, as we know it now, wouldnt survive a single night if people _really_ decided democratically about it.
I don't suppose there's a Civil Liberties Czar by any chance...
As far as I can tell, they think it's working if you can win big money in the lawsuit lottery.
As for me, I think I'll follow NYCL's advice from the previous story and send a little something to help her appeal this. NYCL said to make out checks to Chestnut & Cambronne PA, Esqs. with a note that they're for Jammie Thomas's case and to mail them to:
Brian N. Toder, Esq.
Chestnut & Cambronne, P.A.
204 North Star Bank
4661 Highway 61
White Bear Lake, MN 55110
And that their phone number is (651) 653-0990 if you need it for FedEx.
Give it a few years and movies are where songs are today.
About 20 years ago, making and recording a song was expensive. You needed some studio, good (==expensive) equipment, some way to market and distribute it, in short, you needed the aid of a studio. Today, this all vanished. You can create great music "at home", with rather low cost, your average monthly income will buy you whatever you need.
Let technology grow a little and we got the same with movies. We are already today at the point where great FX are no longer a matter of multi million dollar hardware but rather one of skill and a decent but affordable FX program. Video cams getting better and cheaper every month. Professional editing software also dropped from many thousands to a few hundred bucks. In no more than 10 years, the movie studios will face the same problem the music studios have today: They become obsolete for the ambitioned creator.
They don't "feel" the pressure yet from both sides, only from the customer side where movies are now being shared like songs have been for over 10 years now. Only recently (i.e. about 5 years now) bandwidth has been large enough that it becomes an issue. Now they react. Now it's too late.
We'll see more laws about this. In 100 years, we'll look at those laws with the same chuckle we now feel when we see laws for the protection of horse drawn cabs, about a man waving a red flag in front of a car or similar crap, lobbied in by a dying business.
Unlike them, the **AAs have a choice, though. They can turn from the middleman that tries to hold artists and customers in a stranglehold to a valuable marketing and PR tool for the former. They have all the necessary tools, knowledge and people to push your songs into the charts and make it a seller. They are, if anything, great at creating a hype. If they can change to this model and become an "advertising agency", they can survive.
If they instead try to cling to a dead business model, they will perish.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.