Slashdot Mirror
Could the RIAA Just Disappear?
BlueMerle writes "Ars Technica is running a story about how EMI is disappointed with RIAA and ultimately they (RIAA) may disappear. 'Is the RIAA as we know it about to disappear? As rumors continue to swirl that EMI will pull its funding from music trade groups like the RIAA and IFPI, an IFPI spokesman tells Ars that the group is in the middle of a major internal review of its operations.'" I wouldn't bet the farm just yet.
Wow, could a trade association pay the ultimate price for engaging in a totally counterproductive strategy that hurt the industry? Could the NFIB be next?
*bets farm*
Your antics make me laugh! Who else could pull off an attempt to sue someone for downloading files who doesn't have a computer?!
Look, I'm no fan of RIAA, but RIAA serves a very important purpose for the recording industry et al, and this is just a bluff/power move by EMI. EMI is getting pissy because RIAA went against them in the Kingston/Dracon case (refusing to follow EMI's wishes). Now EMI is threatening to pull the plug on RIAA.
EMI is acting like a miffed 6 year old. They'll come around.
Always bet on black? No, bet on RIAA.
Hint: NO!
~Vexed and loving it!
We could only dream this would happen. Thank god someone in the industry is realizing that this go for the throat, fuck the consumer attitude of the RIAA is just driving business away.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
"Please, God... reach down and pinch my butt cheeks!" EIGHT YEARS OF PRAYER. Does everyone who got extorted get their cash back? Can they sue for it?
I wish there was a choice that said "Factually Wrong -1" when I mod.
The way things are going in the UK we wont need the equivalent of the RIAA to do the music industries dirty work... we'll have the government.
So is this really that big a story? or are they just reallocating their resources?
set up a website sell your MP3's/Flac/Wav direct to your fans (FOSS could help if there was an easy music selling application that runs on PHP/Cheap Hosting) Profit ! RIAA are just another middleman, cut them out thats what the internet is for !
I think I speak for all of slashdot when I say, "from your lips (or keystrokes) to the gods ears (assuming they exists and they have ears)"
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
Considering they just got a donation of $1 billion from a private donor, according to a /. Firehose entry (it must be said that this entry does not have any supporting evidence and follow-up searches return no evidence) http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=463124
RIAA days are numbered.
If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
If the RIAA disappeared, who could counter-suits be filed against? Is it conceivable that as the legal tide turned, EMI could pull the plug in an attempt to evade responsibility?
With Sony BMG deal, Amazon will offer unlocked MP3s from all major labels. RIAA days are numbered...
I wouldn't bet the farm that the RIAA will disappear they are too important to the music industry, as they should be. I think that the RIAA has gotten side tracked on the real issues of music piracy and needs to stop attacking the consumers. It is the large pirates the ones that are actually making fake discs and selling them for a profit that need to be stopped, as they should. Turning off large sites that share music illegally should also be targeted. Music shouldn't be free or you wouldn't have an industry, but on that same note you don't alienate your consumers by making them feel like criminals(even if they just rip their CD to their MP3 player).
I think what is really important is that their is an internal review going on, maybe a large shakeup will ensue and we can hope to get everything back to the way it should be. Protecting users from fake copies of albums, and protecting musicians from mass pirating. Your always going to have an underground community, you're just going to have to make sure your product is superior and stop the major counterfeiters.
...but I would bet a pig and four chickens, if you were laying good odds.
I'm always leery of my dentist, because he provides me with lots of advice on how to make my dental hygiene better. This, in turn, results in less visits from me, and ultimately less money for him. Thankfully, EMI is the "dentist" of the recording industry. The world needs more dentists.
The music industry needs a lobby group to bribe the government to stamp out evils such as net and satellite radio.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
So EMI will no longer farm out its enforcement duties to the RIAA. That's the entire point of the article. There's nothing to imply that they won't continue to protect their intellectual property. Just don't get all excited, now.
There's a few things that still have to change:
1) Copyright should be reduced in duration.
2) The penalties must be adjusted to be reasonable.
3) People must come to respect the rights of property holders, not violate them blindly. Copyright has lots of negative impliciations when well beyond the term of commercial viability, but I believe that copyright can be adjusted to accomodate both that and the property rights of the creator.
4) Slashdot-crowd must abandon the notion that "not-for-profit" redistribution of someone else's work should be permitted without permission of the rights holder.
--
Our microcontroller kit. Your code. Instructional guide and free videos.
If by "disappear" you mean disband, only to have the exact same people start up another, less publicly hated, organization.
My only real hope is that they decide to be less evil in their new incarnation.
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
*POOF*
They're gone...
In twenty years, the RIAA is going to be a spook story that criminals tell their kids at night. "Rat on your pop, and the RIAA is going to come and serve you with a lawsuit!"
--------
This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
If you think the recording industry is giving up on suing people, you are seriously deluded. But then, most people who claim to hate the RIAA really only hate the fact that they are getting caught and can't get free music. They come up with some huge rationalization about why it's ok for them to take music without paying for it, and complain that they are being treated unfairly for breaking the law. So they are essentially very deluded people to begin with.
Good Riiadance, Byatches...
But, as for what gets posted, damn it seems awfully cliquish. As in someone can be first submitting, but someone else gets the goods just by posting a different URL and coming up with a slash-baiting jingle.
Maybe to combat this, Slash should rotate submitters and limit them to x-number per month or quarter and put of a "compliance" graph showing that the same, tired old names are sidelined for a while. Well, unless worse submissions run for a while...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
they are already irrelevant. in an era of cassette tapes and cds, yes, the riaa was relevant. the copyrigh skirting players were few, and they were slow. but their mission statement in an era of point and click distribution is impossible to fulfill, where no one plays by the rules, and the rules themselves are defunct and antiquated
so the only question about their disappearance is will it be gradual, as those who fund them slowly wither away themselves, or will it be quick and dramatic, as those who fund them get a glimmer of insight in their final years of existence as economic forces
adios assholes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In other news ...
Could the MPAA just disappear?
Could Microsoft just disappear?
Could Fred Thompson just disappear?
Could car analogies just disappear?
I really think the record labels should go away along with the RIAA. They were a necessary evil when recording, distribution, marketing had huge upfront costs. Technological advancements have made professional recording orders of magnitude cheaper, and the Internet has done the same for distribution and marketing.
Except for the very top tier, artists make very little from record sales. Why bother? Just give the music away for free and make money the way artists have for a long time: from live performances and merchandising. Consumers will be happy, artists will do as well as or better than they ever have, and all of this foolishness will go away. A bunch of greedy record execs will be looking for work, but will anyone care?
If it did, I'd piss on it!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Ok, let me try to add this up. As I recall, internet radio was threatened by the bully-arm of the RIAA, SoundExchange, forcing royalty payments even for non-RIAA affiliated artists (or however the legally correct way to express that, if there is one). Remember this one, gang? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/29/0335224
So, how does this add up? Does EMI pulling away from RIAA defang SoundExchange thereby seriously reducing the threat to internet radio? Or in the ironic comedy of the new century, does the RIAA, with sounds of a death rattle (added for drama, I'm shameless), turn around and unleash SoundExchange on EMI and bring suit under the same grounds as the attack on internet radio?
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
So EMI will no longer farm out its enforcement duties to the RIAA.
So if you countersue, your suit will actually be applied to the person who brought the suit in the first place and not their disposable puppet.
This is why mob bosses contract hits out - makes it harder for the law to find them. What we have here is a mob boss who is unhappy with his hitman and is going to do his own hits. Should make it easier for the law to reach the responsible party.
It would be a layer off the onion at least, which would help.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I think the obvious reason behind this is that the RIAA is getting huge negative press and judges are starting to get royally ticked off with them.
The RIAA will just be replaced with a new organization with the same goals just with a different name.
I don't purchase music any more due to the RIAA suing people, period! If they disappear and we can get past this idea that everyone is a thief, then maybe, just maybe, I'd buy music again.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
We could power a Car Analogy off the engine of First Post angry replies to other comments.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Like Napster?
"The customers took down the Central Lawsuit Server, so they went distributed. Now you have no idea how many fragments of the former RIAA there are, and you can never be sure you've got them all."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'm not holding my breath on this one and if I did I'll look like a Smurf. The RIAA will re-incarnate into another form so that the RIAA as is is now will become something else doing something similar under a different name like ASS (Association of Seventy-Eight Service).
Why don't EMI want to fund RIAA, look at the financials:
EMI Group reports revenue of £867.9m compared to £924.6m in the prior year, adecline of 4.1% at constant currency.
Group digital revenues grew by 68.4% at constant currency, totalling £73.7m in the first half. Digital revenues represented 8.5% of total
Group revenues, significantly up from 5.4% in the financial year ended 31 March 2006.
EMI Music revenues declined by 5.2% at constant currency, largely reflecting the phasing of the planned release schedule which, as previously indicated, has a greater weighting to the second half of the financial year. Digital revenues grew by 78.2% at constant currency, representing
9.4% of total divisional revenues in the half.
The RIAA doesn't provide a return on the investment, they are only making money on downloads, they have to buy in to digital music fully to survive. They might be the first major to wake up to the fact fully.
Any new RIAA could simply go back to what it was before they became litigation central: A place that spent its money promoting music in general and handing out those gold records, compiling statistics, etc.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
And yet... EMI is still the only label offering content in iTunes+. That's the DRM free side of iTunes, btw.
So it doesn't look like RIAA is going to go away, its just likely to lose 25% of its membership body. Well, even less than that, since EMI doesn't actually possess 25% market share.
EMI has been going against its brethren for a while now. Let us hope they don't fail...
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
I'm not one bit surprised. Apparently EMI is realising that the RIAA's failing to organise the music industry, now that file sharing is more popular than ever. RIAA is simply too old to keep up in this new world of free information exchange and can no longer support itself upon the ageing copyright laws of the present.
At least, that's my theory.
This was a long-time in coming. It didn't make financial sense. Look. The major record labels have been pumping million$ into the RIAA for years. In return, they've sued 10 year old girls and, on many cases, gotten a $2,000 settlement. Hmmm. Millions for thousands? If a car company did this they'd be called Ford - and be in just as bad a financial state. It's pushed their customers to more cost-effective means of acquiring music - i.e. iTunes. "We don't like the way our customers use our product so let's sue them to make them act right." Yeah, that worked. Despite the RIAA's best spinning, CD sales are still tanking. Why buy a CD for 3 good songs and 12 crappy ones for $12 when you can go to iTunes and get the 3 good ones for $3??? Ummm, duh!! The lawyers and lobbyists have been riding this gravy train for years just sitting back and laughing at the dumb record execs they've fooled into accepting the $2,000 settlements as progress and justification for the million$ they've supported them with. Is it any surprise that finally someone looked at the books and said "Wait a gosh darn minute! Something here looks a bit fishy. Ms. Jenkins - what's all this red ink about on the bottom line???" I think EMI is the first to demand change and the others will soon follow suit . . . no pun intended.
no idea if their flying monkeys would go away, but the RIAA would.
and their little dog, too.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
If this actually happens, then I should be able to buy EMI music again without moral objections.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
If they do, they'll probably take a hint from our corrupt ass government (with whom these corporations are likely in bed with) and resurface 2 months later as the:
AARI (with a new logo and everything)...
that suing your user base, alienates them!!!! Boy does that come out of left field!!! RIAA might be droppped because what the music industry thought(because of thier egos)would scare the consumer into not downloading music. Instead it has become a PR nightmare and pushed customers away. I don't even hear about people downloading anymore....except from the companies. I hear people are looking elsewhere for music, not buying because of RIAA, not buying new muscic in favor of older stuff, or not buying because mainstream music has become cliche and predictable. I'm willing to bet there's a lot of people in the music industry MFing Metallica right now.
I pulled my funding of the RIAA over a year ago.
No new music for me.
dont tease me like that
To copy from one is plagiarism. To copy from many is research.
Mod parent up.
That's pretty much what I was going to write!
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
the music industry has traditionally made a lotta cash offa sales of copyright tunes
now you clones all think ya gonna rip them guys off?
not without a fight and guess what: they got the law on their side
if ya pirating music on a p2p net my advice is quit and hope you ain't already on their list
There is a theory which states that if ever for any reason anyone discovers what exactly the RIAA is for and why it is here it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another that states that this has already happened.
Not before trolls, son. Not before trolls.
Read my manifesto:
http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2008/01/bloggers-manife.html
Bye,
Oliver