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Investors, "Beware" of Record Companies
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Motley Fool investment Web site warns investors to beware of 'Sony, BMG, Warner Music Group, Vivendi Universal, and EMI.' In an article entitled 'We're All Thieves to the RIAA,' a Motley Fool columnist, referring to the RIAA's pronouncement in early December in Atlantic v. Howell, that the copies which Mr. Howell had ripped from his CDs to MP3s in a shared files folder on his computer were 'unauthorized,' writer Alyce Lomax said 'a good sign of a dying industry that investors might want to avoid is when it would rather litigate than innovate, signaling a potential destroyer of value.'"
They may get to the point where lawsuits are the only real income they have left. When that day comes, and all their Congressional bribe money has dried up, I think we'll see the courts and politicians finally start to hit back hard and finish them off. And they'll die still clutching their outmoded CD's, like pathetic John Henry's fighting innovation to the bitter end.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Now where have I heard that before... Oh, that's right. SCO. And look where they're at...
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I guess the sue your customer business model isn't working out for them. Who knew?
These guys (disclaimer: I'm not one of them and in fact haven't owned any stock for over 20 years) always say that you should pick a stock with a dividends to price ratio if ten to one or better.
Microsoft, the last I heard, pays no dividends.
So I think MS is probably a "stock for fools". If you buy a stock with the expectation of its price rising, you're gambling, not investing. That's not to say that gambling that Mars won't explode in the next two weeks isn't a good bet; some gambles are worthwhile.
As to the record companies, DUH! You don't need an expert to tell you that a company whose sales have been falling for over five years is a turkey.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I wonder how they define a shared folder? I'd imagine an shared folder to them is any folder on a computer that is connected to the internet, WAN or LAN, has a CD or DVD burner in it, has any kind of magnetic removable drive, or any computer in which the hard drive can be removed.
I doubt he'd say much.
RIAA: track record of suing their own customers, based on "evidence" gathered via pretty shady means
MS: doesn't regularly sue their own customers (their competitors, sure, but not random joe off the street)
Failure of vista: Not the only money maker that MS has. Also not their only market.
Failure of music sales: only thing the riaa has.
I suppose they want it both ways - keep people on the edge and they're easier to control or something.
Bad comparison! John Henry was a champion for the dignity of human work. He illustrated the very real danger of big business treating individuals as disposable ever since the industrial revolution. John Henry as the RIAA? Ridiculous.
Might be a good time to listen to a few tunes from a label that's not evil.
[Caveat: I don't work for them, own any part of the company, or know anyone personally who's released a CD through them. I just buy their stuff and dig Shannon Coulter's sultry voice.]
Microsoft is digging whatever they could find in their "Imaginary Property" port folio of patents to find something with which they could scare client who would potentially consider fleeing to open-source. They're basically trying to invent new ways to kill their adversary.
/. whereas most of the time is companies who don't really understand how they should behave to follow the GPL. Most of the time it's more a polite exchange of explanation (you should publish that piece of code...) than threats.
**AA are suing who ever they can going through complicated legal justification trying to explain why "Fair Use" never applies, trying to persuade that "Format shifting" represents "Unlawful evil piracy", etc. They're basically trying to find ways to stop everything that normally should be allowed by the law (and somewhat managed to partly achieve this goal with DMCA).
On the other hand the situation with GPL is much simplier.
The copyright law is simple : Thou shall not copy. (outside the list of exception, like personnal backups, etc. against which the **AA are fighting).
The GPL is a license : it gives additional rights, more specifically it gives you the right to freely distribute copies of GPL software, as long as you pass along the accompanying freedom to the next in the chain.
If you don't follow the license, you lose those additional rights and everything reverts to the official copyright law. Which says No-No to distributing software which you don't own personally.
They're basically making sure that the users retains their freedom by using pre-existing legal infrastructure.
You'll notice that :
- GPL isn't threatening to sue users at all. The whole "FreeSoftware" concept is about giving freedoms to users. They threaten to sue companies that would be taking away those freedoms. And in fact they don't threaten as often, as they help misguided companies who don't really understand the GPL. There are only a couple of suit-threats that we've heard here on
The end users benefits of the GPL, whereas with the former the end user is the target.
- There are no auto-settlement-bot spilling standart cease-and-desist suit-threat
- GPL isn't trying to twist the interpretation of the law to try to remove rights that where granted in the first place (They're not arguing what is "Fair Use" and trying to limit it). The GPL is based on pre-existing laws.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Actually, I wonder how their stock shares fare.
Many companies have been proclaimed dead or dying while their shares kept going up, and they keep going up still. Some portals were proclaimed to be dead because their percentage market share vaned comparing to Google, but they actually gain users as the net grows, and they actually grow and note profits each year.
So how's it for the record industry?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
If anyone here thinks that the Fool will harm the **AA's business, think again. The Fool is only telling us what is happening. In a family gathering of more than 25 people for present opening ceremonies this year, I watched quite gleefully to find that only ONE CD or DVD had been purchased. ONLY ONE! There were cameras, books, clothes, presents galore... but only ONE lonely little DVD.
My in-laws really don't care about the **AA and their ways, CDs and DVDs are JUST TOO EXPENSIVE. Never mind the lawsuits, their crap products are priced way out of order.
Time to start ePhoenix records I think....
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
They have a 20 year old notion of how much a "unit" they need to make. This notion is ludicrous given the tech advances we have. They failed to keep dropping prices for their disks when they could. Instead of using the volume sales concept, they stubbornly stuck to making dollars profits on cents worth of plastic and paper. They just don't get it that price gouging doesn't work. The ultimate decision makers in that industry who decide pricing levels are *all millionaires*, they just can't relate to what stuff costs anymore for people who are not. And the legislators they "consult" with, similar. they live and work in an extremely expensive part of the US, DC, and none of them can be considered "working class" in the traditional sense. In short, the pair of them that try to set pricing and laws when it comes to IP and tech advances mean for tangibles cost just can't see the forest for the trees, they have no practical frame of reference. And even with "market studies", those can be flawed as well, and the ultimate proof of "market studies" is whether or not your widget you sell sells with full customer satisfaction or not, and in this case, they fail it, so even their marketing studies are therefore flawed by empirical evidence. We can all see it, right there in plain sight. If they weren't, we wouldn't be seeing these articles all the time or be discussing copies and copyright and so on. They just can't handle the innovation and ramifications of replicator technology so far, even though we are still in the tiny opening phases of such tech. That means as we get closer to cheap tangibles replication for the "masses" guy, star trek level tech, headed that way, they will continue to screw up, using their concept of enforced luddism by "law" as a business model. It is not only just plain ignorant and stupid, it is harmful to the over all economy and for society in general.
I suspect musicians will go the same route. Songs will be given away as free advertising, and they'll make their money by booking performances and concerts (and selling memorabilia at such). For all practical purposes that's the way most of the RIAA-contracted musicians work anyway right now, since the studios keep 95% to over 100% (the band owes them money) of all the proceeds from song sales.
This is a pretty unequivocal statement. If you make your personal copies available for distribution, they are no longer your personal copies since distribution is not the purpose, right, or intention for maintaining personal copies
No it isn't. Just becasue a folder is defined as shared does not mean you can or want to distribute music from it. The problem is that they don't define what a shared folder is. I have folders on my machine that are shared within my home network but not to the internet. So does this mean I can't place music in them? There is a BIG difference between locally shared folders and ones that are made available to the internet.
I AM A SEXY SHOELESS GOD OF WAR!!!