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Will the New RIAA Tactic Boost P2P File Sharing?
newtley writes "The RIAA's claim that it'll stop suing people may have serious consequences... for the RIAA. When it dropped its attack on seven University of Michigan students, Recording Industry vs. The People wondered if the move was linked to three investigations, with MediaSentry as the target, before Michigan's Department of Labor and Economic Growth. Now, 'LSA sophomore Erin Breisacher said she stopped downloading music illegally after hearing about the possibility of receiving a lawsuit, but now that the RIAA has stopped pursuing lawsuits she "might start downloading again,"' says the Michigan Daily, going on to quote LSA senior Chad Nihranz as saying, 'I figure, if there aren't as many lawsuits they will come out with more software to allow students to download more.'"
What about some of the other potential tactics we've discussed recently, such as the UK's proposed £20 per year film and music tax or the $5 monthly fee suggested in the US? Is there anything the RIAA can do to reduce illegal file-sharing without generating massive amounts of bad publicity?
No, I firmly believe there isn't. They chose the wrong strategy, and got caught out in the cold. They lead lives that are so different from ours, they've become convinced by their own arguments, just like the Wall Street bankers and their bonuses. The RIAA really doesn't have much of a choice but to throw in the towel and start off in a different direction. Of course, they won't, and I'll be one of those cheering their burial.
They've made it this far because a large part of their argument comes from the idea that file-sharing is globally illegal. This type of file sharing has to be made firmly, clearly, and once-and-for-all clearly legal. Somewhere, we have to ask ourselves what value do recorded music, video, and programs have? If we're not happy with the free-market answer, we have to find it in ourselves to come up with a solution that modifies the free-market such that we support these activities. Simply declaring the free-market illegal is not a valid strategy. It hasn't ever worked in the past-- witness alcohol, drugs, etc...-- and it's not working now.
Now, I for one think that the arts are far more worthy than the sciences. As an engineer, I was offered a salary 5 times what a friend was making, even though I was going to do numerical analysis of toilet paper (no shit, pun intended) and she was working 80 hour days with children's theater. If the fact that we live in a society that values toilet paper more than theater offends you, then you need to make the decisions in your life that reflect this.
Science is an awesome hobby, and it's what I do for a living, but somewhere we're seriously out of whack when business is worth more than life. The RIAA mentality shows this, and there's really nothing they can do except fight until they've carved out a sufficiently well protected niche that they can survive in some minimal fashion. To take an analogy from Go, they're trying desperately to make two eyes, even though the game is practically over.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Is there anything the RIAA can do to stop copyright infringement without looking like a bunch of asses? Sure, but they've now in a deep hole dug on the unsustainable premise that they could either sue all infringers out of existence or at least enough of them to cow everyone else into staying off P2P. Turns out that wasn't working either.
Here are my proposals for ways they can get turned around:
1. Do their damnedest to promote all the usable online services. iTunes, Amazon, the whole smash. No DRM anywhere, though I think people won't mind fingerprinting. Do a mix of buy-to-own and subscription services; there are separate markets for each. Sell audio with lossless encoding (Apple Lossless and FLAC if that works in the non-Apple ecosystem). Raffle off concert tickets for buyers on the download services. Try to reach everyone -- Windows, Mac, Linux.
2. Do a "legal" P2P service that traffics purely in 128kbps MP3s of popular songs with lead-in or lead-out ads. "Weezer's Red Album -- now available from your online music store." That kind of thing.
3. Let Web radio live. I'm sure there's a reasonable profit stream there that everyone can tap into if nobody strangles the golden goose, so to speak. It also drives sales -- when I was a kid the only music I actually bought was stuff I'd already heard on the radio. Get people to actually use the "radio" function in iTunes and web browsers and whatnot. Music radio on 3G phones. The possibilities are endless here.
4. Instead of chasing homemade music videos off YouTube, get people to pay a "licensing fee" of say $5 and then let them be. There are also cross-licensing deals for advertising dollars to be had with the video services.
5. ENOUGH WITH THE MEDIA TAXES. If I pay a "tax" on recording media or my iPod's hard drive or whatever I will download everything I can for free. I'm going to assume I'm already "paid up" because guess what, I am. Besides, if we pay a media tax the music industry should be quasi-nationalized.
6. (the one they'll never accept) Deal with the fact that music is now a more distributed phenomenon and that the massive profit margins the record companies saw on audio cassettes and CDs just can't exist anymore. Make what profit you can instead of getting sucked down the toilet with the rest of the economy.
I will bet good money, though, that the RIAA won't do any one of these things over the next five years-- instead they'll just chase the phantom of infringement that they'll never be able to stop, music sales will go completely down the drain, and the world music industry will restructure around the online services being labels themselves. Cut your song in a recording studio then upload it to Amazon and iTunes. They take 35%, you take the rest. Hell, the RIAA should be very very scared of this happening, and I expect they are, but they're going to make it happen and maybe that's a good thing for all us music buyers.
The distribution of these fees will be such that independent artists get a token sum, while the RIAA gets money for nothing.
I disagree with this. Most independent artists aren't affiliated with RIAA-represented labels. That's a lot of what makes them "independent". If the RIAA is doing the collecting, why would they pay out to labels that don't want to work with them?
This guy's the limit!
I was half joking, but you seem to have missed my point: everything you say is right, from a point of morality of fairness it's a horrible dragnet law that would indiscriminately punish plenty of innocent people on the assumption that they might have done something wrong. Of course it's insane.
The (presumably unintended) consequence, however, is that they are making the tacit statement that the monetary value of copyright infringement is £20/household/year. They're admitting that they're unable to stop infringement and thus accepting the money in lieu of the cessation of 'piracy'. Since they (in this hypothetical situation) will choose to charge me £20/year for my downloaded media, I will in turn accept this offer (as I am being forced by law to do) and choose to download for free all the media that I would otherwise have spent money on, and encourage anyone I can get to listen to do the same.
Incidentally, if every household in the UK did pay this fee it would come to about £433,000,000. That's less than half of the music industry's current revenue, and the proposed UK tax includes films too.
Just because an idea is unfair and ridiculous doesn't mean that (in this case) we can't make it work to our advantage!
Until recently, most music in iTunes was DRM-encumbered, which more than likely turned a good number of people off from the service, especially if you didn't own an iPod. I'm not sure whether or not iTunes works in Linux either, but the Windows version may be working through Wine. That's probably enough to turn most /. readers away.
eMusic doesn't have the problems that iTunes has/had, but I don't think it has anywhere near the selection that's available on iTunes, at least if you like more mainstream types of music.
Of course people have the option of going to the Amazon music store. MP3 downloads that will work on any player and no DRM. I've never used the service so I can't speak to how easy it is to use, but a quick check of the website suggests that the price tends to be a bit more reasonable than iTunes (there's a list of 'popular' songs that are selling for $.79) which is kind of nice.
Why people are still 'pirating' / 'stealing' music is beyond me. I suppose I don't mind it if people want to try before they buy, but both songs and albums are cheaper than they've been in over a decade. Maybe a good chunk of piracy is people who're just trying something out. The numbers only reflect downloads, not how many people downloaded it and then either deleted it or went on to purchase a legitimate copy.
I suppose the best way to prevent the piracy that the RIAA likes to complain about is to create a music store where music is sold at a reasonable price without DRM in a high quality format that works for almost everyone. They can completely remove the try before you buy folks from the equation by offering a DRM-encumbered version of the album that you can download free of charge and listen to as many times as you like for a limited number of days. If you like the album you can purchase it and the DRM disappears forever.
The only people who'll still bother with torrent sites are for the most part those people who never intended to purchase the music anyway. They can be left alone or litigated to hell for all I care.
Of course this makes entirely too much sense and the odds that we'll see it before the dinosaurs running the RIAA are completely incapable of thinking in modern terms. They're trying to hold on to a business model that doesn't make sense in today's world and are completely destroying their business while doing it.
If they wanted to remain in business and remain profitable they would open up a worldwide store similar to the one I outlined above. No more waiting for an album to be released months later in another part of the world and no more having to resort to downloading an album simply because it's not available in your country. Why this hasn't been done already is completely beyond me.