RIAA Wants $1.5 Million Per CD Copied

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Not content with current statutory damages, the RIAA is pushing for higher damages for infringement, damages that would total $1.5 million for copying a CD with ten songs. It's all part of debate over the proposed PRO-IP Act. William Patry, a lawyer who wrote the seminal seven-volume reference on US copyright law, called it the most 'outrageously gluttonous IP bill ever introduced in the US.'"

Comments

$1.5 million?

[KublaiKhan]

I knew that 'going gold' meant a lot to an artist, and I knew the price of gold was high, but $1.5 million sounds just a little high...

Or is this just for the ones that go platinum?

Re:$1.5 million?

[teasea]

Gold is 500,000 copies and platinum is 1,000,000. So if you go Gold, that's a net of $7,500,000.00. Now the company spent $100,000 to $250,000 recording, $3,000,000 in marketing (mostly payola) and another half million or so on incidentals (hookers, bail). Oh, and stamps. Add a half million.

The artist on the first album will 1 to 3% of the net, so with the remaining 3 and half million or so, that means the artist only owes the company an additional $150,000.00. Luckily there are 4 or 5 members in the band, so it's relativly painless. You should be able to make most of that back on your next album assuming you can come up with quality material in 9 months when the first album took 12 years of writing. (It's easier to just use the same songs with different lyrics.)

Have a cigar!

Re:$1.5 million?

[KeyboardMonkey]

To put this in perspective, the entire US GDP in 2006 was $13.13 trillion. That's 8.7 million copied CDs.

I wonder what that is in Libraries of Congress.

Re:$1.5 million?

[rapturizer]

I think we should let them, only with the stipulation of a $1.5 Billion penalty when they file a lawsuit against the wrong person. Of course, this would be payable in cash to the person they sue. I would think that this would be an equally justifiable fine and would encourage some top tier lawyers to defend the public for a marginal percentage.

Re:$1.5 million?

[Anonymous Coward]

Might want to check the numbers. Last I heard most major artists were costing 1 to 5 million in the studio, that's ignoring the Michael Jackson 25 mill per album in studio expenses. That's an average and some are more. Low end artist may be in the 100K to 500K in studio time. I'm talking major labels not Jim Bob buying a few hours of studio time or doing it in his garage. The actual studio cost is a tiny part of the expense the majority going to expenses and demands of the artists. Some expenses are legit like studio musicians and engineer time in post processing and mixing but the bulk tends to be conditions artists demand and their small army of people that are around them. Also for a major album 3 mill would be on the low end for advertising. They don't spend film money but they spend north of what they spend on producing the albums, once again ignoring Michael Jackson, in his case he just shows up in public sporting a new nose or weird outfit. The real expense though are the five or ten albums that tanked to get the hit one. Now that sales for even established artists are dropping like rocks they are going to be far less likely to go with new talent. Kind of the irony of the situation. Companies like to play it safe when things get tight. Better to spend 5 or 10 mill cranking out another Brittany album than give ten unknown artists a shot at it. With a lot of the singers these days it's in the post production anyway. Ole Paris Hilton helped let the cat out of the bag on that one. She can't sing a note but her album was passable once they got finished filtering it. It's why so many young artists don't sing live, you'd never recognize their real voice. The excuse is the dance numbers and difficulty getting clean sound. The real reason is a good share are there for looks and can't really sing.

Does the RIAA have a licensed proctologist?

[Steeltalon]

I ask because I want them to be safe. It has to be painful pulling garbage like this out of their asses.

Re:Does the RIAA have a licensed proctologist?

[spun]

It has to be painful pulling garbage like this out of their asses. Not when you're THAT big of an asshole. The RIAA could pull a dump truck out of their asses and not feel a thing.

Re:Does the RIAA have a licensed proctologist?

[VultureMN]

You are, indeed, correct.

I think this is the first, and probably last, time on /. where a link to the goatse guy would be ONtopic.

Re:Does the RIAA have a licensed proctologist?

[Malevolent Tester]

The digestive system isn't a dump truck - it's a series of tubes.

Wrong decimal place?

[IronMagnus]

Maybe they ment $15

Re:Wrong decimal place?

[SailorSpork]

Actually, that's about what each infringement is worth. If you use filesharing, and if for each song you download, you upload a song, your infringement for downloading/uploading and album on that fileshare would be about the cost of that same album; about $15. I still don't understand how any competent mind can come up with any more than that per infraction.

Since filesharing is on average 1:1, It's not that each person uploading ten songs is causing thousands of dollars worth of damages, its that thousands of different people are causing ten's of dollars of damage each. But if that were how it was stated in court, legal fees would outweigh damages, and lawsuits would no longer become lucrative sources of income.

Walmart

[im_thatoneguy]

Fuck it. If they say I'm stealing it I'm just going to start "ripping" music from Walmart. The fines are cheaper and less signficant on a criminal record.

Innovation through Litgation!(tm)

[frankie]

Sweet! At that damage level, the RIAA could afford to ditch all pretense of supporting music, and make a killing by sending lawyers down the street in major metro areas to slap subpoenas on every passerby with an MP3 player.

Right then

[Anonymous Coward]

All you trolls that insist copyright infringement is the same as stealing, please point out a single instance of somebody being fined $1.5 million dollars for stealing a CD.

Dollar worth less these days

[chris_mahan]

I hadn't realized the US dollar had lost that much value recently...

"Engineering Expectations"

[plasmacutter]

These people are just "engineering expectations".

They introduce this outrageous dreck, then suggest something which is still outrageous but comparatively mild, like, for instance, forcing ISP's to disconnect users a-la france, or forcing them to pull great firewall of china style 'filtering', or prison sentences for college students.

Then, they'll bloviate on and on about how these new proposals are a "compromise"

Or.. this dreck is merely a red herring to distract activist groups away from that rider they put into the college funding bill to force schools to 'filter' their internet on pain of losing their federal grants.

PRO-IP

[RobBebop]

This is related to the PRO-IP Act (press released on Dev 5, 2007) that is in Congress. Here is who to blame:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI), Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-TX), Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA), and Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Tom Feeney (R-FL), Darrell Issa (R-CA), Steve Chabot (R-OH), Steve Cohen (D-TN), Ric Keller (R-FL), Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), and Robert Wexler (D-FL) introduced the "Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property ("PRO IP") Act of 2007"

Here's the "SHOCK AND AWE" value that the industry is using to get people's attention:

It costs the United States between $200 and $250 billion/year in lost sales, including 750,000 jobs.

Obviously, any rational thinking individual knows that 750,000 individuals are not "out on the streets" because piracy has taken away the revenue streams necessary for employing them.

Similarly, *if* $200-250 Billion isn't flowing into the pockets of Imaginary Property companies each year, doesn't that just mean that Americans are free to spend that same money elsewhere? Shouldn't Americans NOT NEED A $150 Billion handout from the government, if they have all this extra money from their copyright infringement?

Something isn't right...

Re:IOW: steal the physical CD from a store

[ivan256]

One pirated CD copy is worth more than a human life!

An above-average wrongful death compensation award for a healthy working parent would be in the $1-3 million dollar range. You could go murder somebody. It'd be cheaper than pirating a few CDs. And if the CDs had DRM, the jail sentence would be shorter for the murder too! The US military pays out $600 for wrongful deaths in Iraq. A pirated CD copy is worth more than 2500 Iraqis!

In reality though, they're probably asking for so much in hopes that the compromise amount will be high. Hopefully congress tells them to fuck off instead of coming up with a "compromise" that is right in line with what they were really hoping for anyway.

Re:heh

[TubeSteak]

Somehow, I think the RIAA have better lobbyists than you have.

And I think the point is not to actually get $1.5mil per CD, but to have that statute on the books as leverage to get more settlements. Whenever you see legislation like the PRO-IP Act, you have to ask yourself two questions:
1. Who is sponsoring the legislation?
Sponsor:
John Conyers [D-MI]

Co-sponsors:
Rep Berman, Howard L. [D-CA]
Rep Cohen, Steve [D-TN]
Rep Jackson-Lee, Sheila [D-TX]
Rep Schiff, Adam B. [D-CA]
Rep Wexler, Robert [D-FL]

Rep Chabot, Steve [R-OH]
Rep Feeney, Tom [R-FL]
Rep Goodlatte, Bob [R-VA]
Rep Issa, Darrell E. [R-CA]
Rep Keller, Ric [R-FL]
Rep Smith, Lamar [R-TX]

2. Where did the model legislation for this Act come from?

RIAA SUX0RZ

[Anonymous Coward]

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  RIAA wants $1.5 million per goatse viewed

Re:Obligatory Austin Powers Quote

[billius]

It's Dr. Evil, he didn't spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called "mister," thank you very much!

Re:heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever you see legislation like the PRO-IP Act, you have to ask yourself two questions:
1. Who is sponsoring the legislation?
Sponsor:
John Conyers [D-MI]

Co-sponsors:
Rep Berman, Howard L. [D-Hollywood]
Rep Cohen, Steve [D-Nashville]
Rep Jackson-Lee, Sheila [D-TX]
Rep Schiff, Adam B. [D-Hollywood]
Rep Wexler, Robert [D-Disney]

Rep Chabot, Steve [R-OH]
Rep Feeney, Tom [R-Disney]
Rep Goodlatte, Bob [R-VA]
Rep Issa, Darrell E. [R-Hollywood]
Rep Keller, Ric [R-Disney]
Rep Smith, Lamar [R-TX]

Fixed some typos for you.

Careful: Don't double dip

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure the RIAA would love to double-dip, as it were, but if you upload a file to me (which I'm downloading), that's 1 infringement, not two. So, when doing your accounting, don't count both uploads *and* downloads. Or if you do, count them as 1/2 an infringement each. Which, may be what you are doing since you're coming up with a total value of infrigment which is equal to the album's retail price, but it wasn't exactly clear from your writeup.

Statutory damages for infringment of a registered copyright is 3x actual damages, so you could come up with a figure of $45-60 per total album upload/download. I'm with you guys though - I'm not sure where they get 1.5 Million from.

Re:heh

[pclminion]

I disagree with the notion that Republicans = Democrats = Sold out There are real and serious differences between the two parties and anyone who tries to marginalize those differences is usually agitating for a 3rd party or giving in to apathy.

Indeed. Back when I was getting my feet wet in the field of data mining, I decided to download the voting records of the US Senate, at least for the last 20 or so years. This data is publicly available on the government web site. A few Perl scripts later and I had reduced the entire voting record to a single CSV file. Each "issue" (an item being voted on) was represented by a single row. Each column represented a specific Senator, and the values were either "For," "Against," or "No Vote."

I also created a perpendicular data set, where each row represented a Senator and each column represented a specific issue, with the values again being "For," "Against," and "No Vote."

I loaded these data sets into a general data mining tool and ran some trials. Among other experiments, I ran J48 to produce decision trees to predict vote values for each Senator, based on how the Senator voted on some specific "model issues," such as gun control legislation. In other words, based on how a Senator voted on certain issues I could predict how they voted on some target issue. If somebody voted against a pro-life abortion bill, how would they vote on a matter of pollution control? Etc. I also ran the perpendicular analysis: based on how other Senators voted on issue X, how would any given Senator vote on the same issue? These decision trees achieved predictive accuracies of greater than 80% in standard cross-validation testing.

The decision trees are also very informative in that they describe the political influences between Senators. If the topmost branch of the decision tree for Senator X is Senator Y, then we can assume there is some kind of friendship, similarity, or power relationship between those two Senators, at least to some degree. These decision trees are powerful tools for political analysis.

But more to the point, one of the best tests I conducted was the application of EM-clustering to the Senators themselves, with the goal being to divide them into "camps," where each camp had similar voting preferences. I allowed the EM-algorithm to decide, on its own, how many clusters to produce, using an MDL principle. I was only somewhat surprised when the algorithm created three clusters. All the Republicans ended up in cluster 1, along with two Democrats. The rest of the Democrats, as well as all the independents, ended up in cluster 2. The third cluster contained Senators who had run for President. (My theory on why the algorithm created a "Presidential cluster" is because Presidential candidates often spend a long time away from the Senate, during their campaigns, and therefore have long stretches of "No vote" on their records. This makes them appear somewhat similar to each other from a statistical viewpoint.)

When "dumb," statistically based data mining software is capable of grasping the clear differences between Republican and Democrat, it becomes impossible to argue with a straight face that the two parties are the same. A fucking computer can tell the difference, why can't a human?

(By the way, one of the Democratic Senators the computer placed into the Republican party was Hillary Clinton.)