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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...
If brute force isn't working, you are not using enough.
Well, I think I'd at least start collecting evidence that would hold up in court rather than trying to send people scary letters and cross my fingers that would do. RIAA's consistent abuse of the legal system is what I think stings me the most. Organizations set up to protect a business can and do survive without succumbing to such strategies.
But then again... Maybe I would on the other hand want to be a successful lawyer enough to fall for these things, I'm not saying I'm perfect. If I were a lawyer, I'd want to be successful, and it's obviously a reasonably successful strategy for them, or else they wouldn't keep doing it. It depends on how much of a jerk I'd be willing to become.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
I'm against shoplifting, but I don't think that gives storeowners the right to summarily execute anyone they suspect of the crime.
That's really the point. For music, we all believe that artists should get remunerated for their work. Want makes the RIAA evil is that (A) they don't work in the interests of the artists, and (B) their approach to their customers is insulting, intimidating, disdainful and invasive. Some would use stronger words.
The RIAA right now is waging a campaign against music fans, in the name of artists (many of whom do not support their name being so used), and gee, if the people's rights, liberties and freedoms are caught in the crossfire, so be it. Hey, we can even reduce those too!
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'd probably give it up when I realised I was paying $39,000 a year "protection money" to the RIAA.
The RIAA do *not* have the artists' interests at heart, except in so far as that if the artists aren't making money, the RIAA can't extort it from them.
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.
The RIAA represents a group of companies whose primary business model for the last 30 years has been to repackage the same product and sell it to the same customers, over and over. The big boom in music sales was the CD as customers moved away from the fragile vinyl albums of yore. Once the majority of folks realized that CD's were very expensive, and just as fragile as vinyl, they were disappointed. New music, such as it is, has not been selling very well, as over prices songs compete with other forms of entertainment. For the most part, music is used to enhance some other activity, not as the primary entertainment.
During the time that most people were switching to the CD, the record companies, members of the RIAA, colluded to illegally fix prices, and frankly the artists saw none of that money.
Now, the with the customer able to obtain in a fast, easy, and durable form, the music that they want, for as little as 89 cents a track, the record companies are finding that their "buy the same stuff in a different format" business model, isn't working. Rather than attempt to adapt to the new market, arguably difficult and risky, they formed a different plan: litigation.
The cost of filing a suit is trivial. The fear of being ruined in a lawsuit is tremendous, and most people will spend 4-5K dollars to make it go away rather than risk a lifetime of ruin trying to dig out from under a multi-million dollar debt. The fact that RIAA does not gather enough evidence to go to court, and that the evidence gathered is probably wrong as often as 20% of the time, is significant.
The RIAA set up a call center based upon the the techniques of debt collectors, with out the restraint of actually having to be debt collectors. These settlements, as we have seen, are little more than the promise that the RIAA won't sue you again. BUT having admitted that you did violate the copyright, the victim has been set up for a second bite, once the music writers sue for infringement, and then the performers can sue again. So it appears that the business model of suing for millions based upon listening to music will be with us for a long time.
Using the legal system to extort money from people is wrong. Making it a business, is particularly evil.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
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