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Who Runs RIAA's Settlement Information Center?
eatonwood writes "Who is behind the RIAA's collections efforts? This comment at CallFerret says it is a company called PSC and lists a bunch of websites and contact information for them, but the connection to RIAA is still not completely clear (aside from the presence of a couple of clearly RIAA sites on the same server as PSC's). Anyone know anything more about who is doing RIAA's dirty work?"
Someone should really setup a time to do a mass prank call attack. Could be quite hilarious.
The Devil?
Attitudes make the difference between Space and Time: we want to MAX our temporal, and MIN our spatial extension.
But he runs the IRS... oh wait!...
... Satin himself...
I honestly don't understand peoples absolute preoccupation with the RIAA. Let me ask you something...
You're artist, designer, or coder. You make things. Doesn't matter what it is as long as it's easily copyable on the internet (music, images, web pages, software). You do this for a living. One day someone sets up a web page that gives what you sell for a living away to others for free. What would you do? How would you handle it? Would you just tolerate it? What if you began to notice you were no longer making $40,000 a year and ended up making only $20,000 a year? Would you give up the art that you love?
I'll admit, what I do know of the RIAA is they are extremely heavy handed, so much so that it's entirely possible that innocents are wrapped up in their vendetta. They are sloppy, thuggish, and an out right bully. What can they do? What would you do, just start giving away that which you make your living on? Is that the answer? Is that what everyone wants?
Maybe somehow I left behind on this whole internet thing, since I don't use Gnutella or Bittorrent. I pay for the stuff I use and listen to. I guess I'm a fool for seeing value in the arts that I love in my life, a value worth paying for.
Burn Hollywood Burn
If brute force isn't working, you are not using enough.
Purely out of curiosity, does the US have any equivalent to UK Companies House?
If they were a UK company, you could get a list of directors of both the SIC and various RIAA member companies and their home addresses through Companies House. All you need to do then is see if any names match up.
Obviously this doesn't help if the company has been set up as a totally separate entity with a totally separate list of directors, but it would tell you pretty quickly if Mr. Bloggs (who lives at 9 Acacia Avenue) runs company A and Mrs. Bloggs (who also lives at 9 Acacia Avenue) runs company B.
Indeed. I had to give up the fags. I was getting through ten a day. Sometimes up to twenty on a big night out. When I had that many I used to feel really bad when I woke up in the morning. Also lots of people complained about the smelly butts. I think I was desensitized to the smell and never noticed. I never could tell my parents about it either, I always had to have a shower before I saw them in case they could tell. I felt ashamed and I'm glad I quit.
To put it another way:
Imagine if bricklayers had to be paid by every person who visited a house they built several years ago.
That would be almost impossible to police.
But it is even more difficult to keep track of people who listen to music or watch video. That's even more difficult to police.
Instead, bricklayers get paid for making new buildings, and not for buildings they've already finished. Equally, artists should get paid for making new art, not art they've already finished.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Those analogies have nothing to do with cars.
"People should be paid for doing, not paid for something they have done."
as a matter of interest, what is your view of inheritance tax?
Surly it should be 100% right?
23% of the richest 1,000 people in the UK did NOTHING to get the money but be born with rich parents. They are paid for doing nothing, and never have contributed anything whatsoever.
Surely if your principle holds, it should be illegal for your parents to leave you anything in their will right?
If not, explain to me the difference.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Those analogies are usually unhelpful. Bricklayers don't need to be paid by everyone who visits the house because a) they have never been granted ownership of any part of the house b) they agreed to be paid a finite sum of money upon completion of the job.
However, if I *own* the house, I am entitled to charge everyone who wants to visit it.
What I profoundly dislike about anti-copyright activists is their desire to force their views upon everyone else. At present, nothing prevents artists from doing what you have suggested above. It's up to the artists to decide whether they want to charge everyone who listens to what they have created, or simply want to give their work away for free.
You should never forget that copyright has tremendous benefits and, in many cases, protects the "little man" too. Do you think that a struggling artist would be happy to learn that a big-name band has "stolen" one of his songs, but he has no recourse against them?
I personally think that there is value in what was written 20 years ago! I enjoy listening to the artist's performance, and I believe that he should be compensated for his work. Do you think that all artists are immediately catapulted to stardom and have a fan-base that is large enough to make your proposal practicable? It might work, but only for well-known artists or bands.
Let's try something that's actually parallel.
Imagine you're a bricklayer building houses and the concept of credit doesn't exist, and everybody simply has to pay up front in cash for the whole price of the house. Suddenly you go from working on 100 buildings a year to one because 99% of people can't afford to buy a whole house with cash.
Or imagine you've got a $100 million building full of historical artifacts. Now, you could sell it to a private owner for a rich guy's playground. You could sell it to a rich, old philanthropist who would open it to the public for free, if you're lucky enough to find one. You could also set it up like a gallery and charge admission, since each person would be willing to pay a token amount to enjoy the experience without having to buy the whole building that they have no hope of ever affording.
In other words, artists only get paid for art they've "already finished" because it hasn't been paid for yet. Some is more profitable than others. Why do you want to restrict artists to recouping costs, but let businesses turn unlimited profits? How does that even begin to make sense?
Bang on, technology provided the means for this whole business to thrive in the first place and now technology has changed and can take it all away again.
There has always been music, humans like music and it's never going to go away so if 'artists' can't make money using current technology then they need to stop trying, the world doesn't owe them a living, and do something else. Other music will come in to fill the gap and match up with the new technology. In short music is important, 'artists' or particular performers aren't and their marketing and manufacturing businesses definitely aren't important on any fundamental level.
Anyone know anything more about who is doing RIAA's dirty work?
Aren't we doing it? We're parrotting their *evil ways* around, keeping them in the media.
Whoever said "money doesn't grow on trees" never owned an orchard. Whoever said "there's no such thing as a free lunch" never had a grandma. Whoever said "the way to a man's heart is through his stomach" was obviously a virgin woman.
Whoever said "there's no such thing as bad publicity" never owned a restaraunt that was in the newspaper because their samonella-poisoned food killed children.
The RIAA is just plain evil and people need to know the evil they do. They will not gain from negative publicity. Would you have kept Sony's rootkit secret so they didn't get the free publicity?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
OK Mr. Analogy man, lets see if you can clear up this one. Let's say you are a bricklayer who also writes music AND built a brick house for a famous musician that you also co-recorded a top ten hit with. Let's also say for the sake of clarity that the house is filled with old barber shop memorabilia. Now who gets paid and how much?
DK
This is only slightly true. As it turns out, i was recently graced with the excellent opportunity to attend a Q&A with Mitch Glazier the Executive Vice President of Government and Industry Relations and Jonathan Lamy the Senior Vice President of Communications. Right now the RIAA is funding its campaign, in large part, by the money it makes off of the pre-settlement letters and lawsuits that they win. now, if the artist simply said, we take away your rights to all future music, eventually, the RIAA would cease to exist. As a side note, I have never met two more idiotic morons in my life, literally the dumbest people I have ever met, also, slimy...it was like talking to the Lucifer himself, only x2.
His small intestine???