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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?
But if I get taxed £20, i'll be sure to download at least £200 worth of media.
How about producing music people actually want to buy?
I predict the following strategy:
1) Stop suing.
2) Collect data on the rise of file-sharing to justify their lawsuits.
3) Start suing
4) ???
5) Profit.
Well, I'm not sure about #5.
[quote]Is there anything the RIAA can do to reduce illegal file-sharing without generating massive amounts of bad publicity?[/quote] Make a system that is as easy as thepiratebay and has as much stuff. Now it is convenience that is killing them. The Free part doesn't hurt, but it also doesn't help as much as the fact that the legal options are as painful as a root canal.
I believe the ultimate goal for the RIAA is to get a fee from every customer of an ISP. Money for doing nothing. The distribution of these fees will be such that independent artists get a token sum, while the RIAA gets money for nothing. That's what all the litigation is for -- to get this fee system established.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I know this sounds like the start of a bad joke, but this seems to be a fairly simple principle. When the USSR made it nearly impossible to get normal goods that the public wanted, an underground sprang up to fill the need. This is simple supply and demand economics. To generalize, making things overly expensive and tied to one internet connected device is only going to encourage a larger underground market.
People, on the whole, want to do the right thing, but you should not deprive them of their right to do whatever they want with things they have legally bought, or they will circumvent it. Humans adapt, learn, and defeat stupid things like copy protection and vendor-lock in all the time. If they really want to decrease piracy, then they should stop price gouging, stop overly restrictive DRM, allow better "try before you buy" methods, and truly embrace college communities via viral marketing techniques rather than call them criminals.
But hey, you already knew this. At this point, we're just beating a dead horse with this argument.
No, it's a NIGHTMARE.
Why should the music industry get a "yearly fee" from everyone with an internet connection? What if you never download music?
Never mind that if the music industry actually managed to make this happen, they could essentially STOP making music. Why would they bother? They'd be making billions of dollars a year on the *fees*!
A tax (because that's what it is) to keep an industry that produces entertainment/luxury products in business? Fuck that. It's total insanity, and if it ever does happen, the end of the world is near. Seriously.
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.
"Is there anything the RIAA can do to reduce illegal file-sharing without generating massive amounts of bad publicity?"
Well, LOTS of things. /. article on big downloaders also being the biggest purchasers.
1. Stop treating their clients as criminals, (see earlier
2. Make more of their catalog available, faster, and more easily, to more paid download services.
2. Skip the DRM crap, (which will save money, too)
3. Divert the cash currently wasted on criminal clowns like MediaSentry and Sony rootkits to efforts to educate the public on how to download music safely, legally & cheaply.
4. Ink deals with content creators that take into account all revenue streams, (including concerts, the real money-spiners for many artists these days), with a fair share for all and which takes into consideration the investment made by production organisations in developing new talent.
5. Make it easy for people to buy/access, and archive/backup 'premium/HiRes/lossless' content (see 'DRM' above).
6. Promote standards for inteeoperability between various media storage and playback devices. Would I pay for to have my vast mp3 collection automagically tagged and sorted, with the ability to stream/upload to any device I own, and maybe grab the video if I want? Well, yes!
Now I'm going to stop dreaming, and go back to helping my teenage daughter convert a YouTube pop video for use on her iPod.
STOP BUYING AND/OR DOWNLOADING COMMERCIAL MUSIC.
Just stop. Seriously. Boycott any and all bands that go through publishers that have any affiliation whatsoever with these criminals. And yes, regardless of what you think, the RIAA ARE indeed criminals. I'm not talking "criminals" as in America's law, I'm talking "criminals" as in moral and ethical laws. Think "LAWFUL EVIL" for all you D&D fans out there. The only difference between you and them are dollar signs. That goes for the MPAA too.
If we could all go one, maybe two years without buying any music or movies (and I'm sure that's possible...it's called self-restraint) that have ties to these asswipes, they WILL go away because they won't have those pretty little dollar signs any more. Now is the BEST time to do this because of the economy. They're more vulnerable than ever.
Not to mention that only the big labels get a slice of a pie - essentially stifling competition.
Perhaps music should be paid for with taxes. Have musicians submit proposals to a grant fund, or help fund record labels that are deemed worthy. I'm thinking something similar to the way universities and scientific research is handled. I'm just throwing this out there, what do you think?
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!
I don't download any music - haven't in years. Quite simply,
Now, from the blurb:
And who decides which music is should receive funds, and which shouldn't? Music, unlike science, is highly subjective, and there are no wrong or useless projects.
Dilbert RSS feed
I know of people who trade USB keys. They fill them with their favourite songs, and either hand them around, or mail them. I know of people who have exchanged external Hard Drives. Think 500 GB external hard drives full of movies and songs. People will adapt. The RIAA will fall just like the IRA.
The MAFIAA come off as greedy bastards, and fairness is an instinct in all great apes.
It's amazing. I'm reading past articles in Slashdot, and we were already talking about RIAA and MPAA since 8 years ago.
From an article on Sep 11, 2001:
I felt a mix of emotions: disappointed that I wouldn't have the chance to testify and lock horns with the MPAA and other industry lobbyists, and guilty for having such self-centered thoughts during this crisis.
The earliest article I've personally found is the article MPAA vs. 2600 dated May 2001.
The present UK government is insane, so that wont stop them.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Never mind that if the music industry actually managed to make this happen, they could essentially STOP making music
There are some that say this has already happened.
Here's a few options:
- Start treating the indies and non-"top 40 list" artists with respect.
- Stop putting out crap content that isn't worth the price they want to price-fix it at.
- Bring back the single (why do you think iTunes and similar do so well? Because most of the time only one song on the album is any good if it's a MafiAA-produced album).
- Start making the production value of CD's worthwhile again. This means put in proper cover art, lyric sheets, etc rather than just a tiny scrap of paper. Also, stop pushing the normalized volume of the recording so fucking high that it clips out and sounds like crap. Master them lower and retain audio fidelity, thanks.
- Sign some fucking new artists for god's sakes.
There's also one thing I'd love to see happen from the government's end, which would be to reinstate the radio station ownership rules. It used to be, there were over 5000 different radio companies in the US. Now, 98% of the US market is owned by only 5 companies; the biggest and crappiest, "Clear Channel", owns over 50% of the market.
You want to know why your radio sucks today? Because you don't GET local shows any more. There are a small handful of local shows, and the rest is either national-syndicated talk radio (schlesinger, limbaugh, hannity, beck, savage, etc), "top 40" generic shit "music" stations with pre-recorded loops and a guy three states away "reading your local news" to you, or "niche top 40" crap we get down here based on exploiting some racial group (local stations we have here: "La Raza", aka "The Race", the vilest racist mexican Aztlan-movement shit you've ever heard, and "the Box", which is all (c)Rap music about killing cops and regularly features "guest" appearances of the local New Black Panthers leader).
Clear Channel moves into a city, cuts all the employees, pretty much just sets up the stations on automatic reproduction of their master feed, and forgets about you. They get an almost "captive audience" of commuters, and that's that. In many local markets, there is no such thing as "competition" any more because CC owns the entire area.
Reinstate the media ownership rules; make it so we get REAL local music stations again, with REAL DJ's who make their OWN daily playlists, occasionally spin a whole album, and maybe (just maybe) there will be a better chance for music to spread.
Of course, the MafiAA loves media consolidation. That way, they send just one gift basket to one person and get Britney Spears' latest pile of crap spinning on half the stations in the US for five weeks or more, and lock the independent artists completely out of the system much easier. Gyah.
If you can read this sig, congratulations, you have your glasses on!
Is the content itself without value? If so, you are correct in saying there is "NO product". I think about some of my favorite TV shows -- like Firefly -- I think I read it cost $1,000,000 per episode to make. Yeah it got canceled, but with a way to make money, the show would not have been made. Compare the satisfaction of watching a great sci-fi with a slideshow of cat pictures on youtube. The first takes real money to make, and won't be made without a way to recoup those expenses. The second costs virtually nothing, but gets boring after mere minutes.
It's a real issue for media producers -- how to make something better than cat slideshows when people won't pay for the media.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Check Google for blank media tax.
Hasn't stopped them from pursuing copyright violations so far.
You must remember these people are completely desperate. Their business model is dead. And it's a model that gave them millions for *nothing*. Sit behind a desk and collect royalties. Who wouldn't want that to continue? And if you happen to have the morals of a shark, why not try something like this? Double dipping would hardly be the least of their sins.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I shouldn't be forced to pay for music I don't listen to.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?