Slashdot Mirror
BusinessWeek Takes On the RIAA
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "BusinessWeek magazine has gone medieval on the RIAA, recounting in grisly detail the cruel ordeal to which the RIAA has subjected a completely innocent defendant, Tanya Andersen of Oregon. Nobody can read the story and come to any other conclusion than that the RIAA and its lawyers are total jerks. Of course we've been reading about Atlantic v. Andersen on p2pnet.net and on my blog, and discussing it here, but there's something extra special about a mainstream publication like Business Week really letting them have it."
...if Slashdot started naming the large companies behind the RIAA at every occurrence, so any misbehavior on their part is directly related to the "Big Four". Right now, most of us reading about the RIAA don't directly associate them with Sony, Warner, EMI and Universal. And this is exactly what they intended! Let's not endulge them any further.
"The RIAA is fighting very hard to make sure that [Andersen's case] never reaches a jury," says Heidi Li Feldman. I would too if I were doing something on the fringe of legal in a twisted business model that pits your clients (recording artists) vs. their money source (consumers). Asshats!
Funny thing is, that I think their first statement is actually right. The damages are "incalculable" since they quite often used flawed studies, doctored data, fallacious logic, etc. to come up with that "3.7 billion" number in the first place.
Of course at the rate they are going it won't be long before they claim that every single TCP session established with the defendant is an instance of possible copyright infringement, or theft, and that it would just be easier to calculate damages based upon some one's bandwidth
And here's the part that worries me, "The record labels declined to comment for this story, referring questions to the RIAA."
Lets take the best case scenario and say this class action lawsuit ends up being 100% successful and destroys the RIAA. The record labels behind the organization will simply dissolve it, like a snake shedding old skin. The next day a new association will spring up, using new devious tactics for the next 10 years before they too are finally ousted, and so on. Until Sony, Universal, EMI and Warner are held accountable for the actions of the RIAA this won't change.
They've done it at least once already, "The Settlement Support Center was a less public part of the initiative. Its name may suggest a neutral organization set up to resolve disputes with evenhanded objectivity. In fact, it was financed by the record industry and operated like a cross between a call center and a debt collection firm. The SSC has since been dissolved."
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Where did Verizon get teh right to hand out usage information to other businesses? Last I heard the USA was not China, we were not supposed to be subject to monitoring in a Big Brother fashion. Who lets these assholes away with reading our mail, watching our internet usage, censoring our access to information. The culture of the free internet is gone, we are now mice under observation in a lab. Nothing we say or do is private, everything is made available to big business to chew on for opportunities to market to us, extort us, or sue us. And it will only get worse.
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
About time. The more "mainstream" pub on this whole debacle, the better. I think, if you were to lay out all the facts and history in front of the American people (well, those with brains, anyhoo), they would feel this way:
Is piracy wrong? Yes.
Does much P2P activity infringe on copyrights? Yes.
Do copyright holders have the right to defend and protect those copyrights? Yes.
Do the "yes" answers above justify bullying, intimidation, and harassment; spurious, questionable, and sometimes downright wrong technical claims; spying by 3rd parties; end runs around the legal system; or a general reluctance to allow accused file sharers to defend themselves, or take their case to a court of law? NO.
The last question is where the RIAA loses whatever moral high ground they may have.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
They count every download as a lost sale.
This is an obviously specious metric. Everyone has downloaded music for perusal, found out that it sucked ass, and deleted it. And pretty much everyone with bandwidth and friends without it has downloaded music for someone else and either deleted it or has it lying around, never listened to once. These are of course not necessarily lost sales, because these days you can go to a record store and listen before you buy.
The law takes the attitude that duplication and distribution are themselves illegal acts. However, if they do not result in a lost sale, who is being harmed? This is the basic problem with copyright law as it is today written.
I think it's pretty clear that if you can't demonstrate a simply provable loss of revenue, that no one has been significantly hurt. An argument that someone is giving away an endless supply of what you're selling and therefore harming your profits looks reasonable on its face, but if you are selling squid-flavored apple-rutabaga smoothies, then most of the people who get one are just going to pour them out anyway. THIS is what the music industry is upset about today. They want to control the previews of the music. With mp3 downloads people do not need to buy music without knowing if it's good or not, so they can't just make a SUPERSHIT album with one hot single and then sell it to you on that basis any more; practically no one listens to music in the store before they buy it unless it's in the little kiosk, although you can do this in many stores. This is also why the MPAA is so upset about bittorrent downloads. The Movie Theater experience is getting worse all the time and if you know the movie sucks, you aren't going to go see it.
The solution is to make movies and music that aren't shit, and sell them on their merit, but most of these guys wouldn't recognize talent if it ran a train on their ass, so that's pretty much a non-starter business model for the major labels.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The only thing legal about any of this is abuse of process. What you are looking at is mass produced fraud that should result in disbarment of everyone involved and jail time for the ring leaders. They knew what they were going to do to "dolphins" like Anderson with their "drift net" tactics. They also thought they were aiming for a less sympathetic but more pliable target when they targeted "rich" college kids. In all cases, the victims were stripped of their life savings if they caved in and of everything now and forever if they fought. The RIAA music sharing cases are one of the most degraded abuse of the legal system by the rich and powerful ever.
It's time for a backlash. The emails and reports behind this fraud should be ripped open to expose the guilty at the big music publishers.
Pensions are paid into as agreed upon by the employer and the employee with the lion's share being footed by the employee. All the while, corporations are playing financial games with those pensions declaring bankruptcy to get out of them.
And neither do McDonald's employees. What's your point?
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Asshats!
Though you didn't imply that copyright law needs to change because the RIAA are asshats, the entire theme of this post did. So I would like to challenge that directly.
1) The RIAA claims that we need to strictly enforce copyright law (and charge per copy) in order to ensure that artists get paid and continue making music.
2) The RIAA are asshats.
Therefore: we don't need copyright law (and strict enforcement) in order to ensure that artists get paid and continue making music.
This is an example of the "ad hominem" logical fallacy. Yes, they are asshats, but that has no bearing on the arguments they use to defend their business model.
I would summarize their position as a variant of the Hypothetical Syllogism (I am adding more premises than allowed, for brevity).
1) If we do not have strict interpretation and enforcement of copyright law, then people will be able to get an artists work for free.
2) If people can get an artists work for free, then most people will.
3) If most people get an artists work for free, then artists will not be able to make enough money to sustain themselves.
4) If artists cannot make enough money to sustain themselves, then they will have no economic incentive to produce music.
5) If artists have no economic incentive to produce music, then they will not make music.
Therefore: in order for there to be music (which we obviously want), there must be strict enforcement of copyright law.
To the best of my knowledge, that is the line of reasoning being advocated, and it should therefore be logically attacked.
I would specifically (and individually) attack premises 3, 4, and 5. According to the US Department of Labor most musicians work part time (already can't sustain themselves but work anyway) and also many of them earn money through live performances (monetizing their work even though free music is presently available). So my attacks, specifically, are:
3) Artists can still monetize their work, through live performances, merchandising, and alternative business models.
4) Even the lesser gains of part time employment or low-income alternative business models qualify as economic incentive.
5) Some artists produce music for the love of producing music, and think of compensation only after the fact.
So there you have it. In a nutshell I would say that we should at least experiment with the alternative business models, and see how they pan out. If all artists stop making music and America starts to experience cultural starvation, we can always reintroduce strict copyright enforcement later on...and then with much more universal support. As it stands, we are unwilling to even try, largely as a result of irrational argumentation (and, of course, a few wealthy/powerful entities who stand to benefit from our irrational behavior).
Yes but my work is not enough. I am just one 60 year old guy who has to also try to make a living. It is important for the community to come together, and to establish a major web site or wiki type of operation coordinating information.
It is also for the community to get involved in (1) establishing panels of expert witnesses to work for modest fees on the internet issues and hard drive forensics issues, and (2) major fundraising to assist in the legal defense of these folks.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful