Slashdot Mirror
RIAA Paid $16M+ In Legal Fees To Collect $391K
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a rare outburst of subjectivity, I commenced my blog post 'Ha ha ha ha ha' when reporting that, based upon the RIAA's disclosure form for 2008, it had paid its lawyers more than $16,000,000 to recover $391,000. If they were doing it to 'send a message,' the messages have been received loud & clear: (1) the big four record labels are managed by idiots; (2) the RIAA's law firms have as much compassion for their client as they do for the lawsuit victims; (3) suing end users, or alleged end users, is a losing game. I don't know why p2pnet.net begrudges the RIAA's boss his big compensation; he did a good job... for the lawyers."
This is just more evidence that Piracy is Killing Music(tm)! Pirates, apparently less busy stealing food from the mouths of starving artists' starving children than they seemed, managed to pull over 15 and a half million dollars from the RIAA's coffers...
Clearly, we must set up a cabinet-level Department of Intellectual Property so that the War on Pirates can be fought at public expense, with the same efficiency and success as the scourges of drugs and poverty....
Perhaps people who own shares in the RIAA's member companies should sue for misspending?
Thus proving what we've been saying all along:
The RIAA's worst enemy is the RIAA.
"What're ya, fucking stupid?" -George Carlin
Living With a Nerd
It's to instill fear, and reduce the (speculative) lost sales.
If they sell 10 million more albums as a result of spending the 16M in fees, then it's not such a bad deal. (Mind you, I don't think that's the case)
Isn't this somehow linked to the report earlier today:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/13/1737224/RIAA-Accounting-mdash-How-Labels-Avoid-Paying-Musicians
This is a pretty common thing legally. Corporations will often pay legal fees larger than the returns of a court case, if it means they can set precedence for the future. The other benefit is it creates fear in those who would have otherwise pirated songs.
Clearly, $400,000 per downloaded song is not enough. They should raise their demands by 3992%, and everything will be OK.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
They will take that little factoid over to congress and cry, "Help! We're being bled dry here!"
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Is $16 mil chump change to these guys, or what?
How much does the typical marketing blitz for a big star cost, normally?
expandfairuse.org
The entire internet seems to be quaking in fear and ceasing and desisting all over the place.
Quite a well-spent $16M for that one case alone.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Don't worry, I'm sure this is just more Hollywood Accounting for the benefit of the public. It's really a fantastic scheme, claim your income is nothing due to the nasty 'pirates' impinging on good ol' capitalist ingenuity. Also, claim the money you did have has all gone to those greedy lawyers. Everyone already hates lawyers, right? Result: A good honest company, ruined!
I think in this case that means the value of the judgments themselves. What is actually collected from the victims, and what is actually delivered to the RIAA's clients may be another matter entirely.
Either way, bwahahahahhahahahhahahahahahahahahahah!!!!!!
Thank you for the good chuckle, NewYorkCountryLawyer. I'm curious: where on the timeline of events does this 2008 disclosure form fall? Is that before or after some of the atrocious monetary awards given out by the courts? In other words, will the RIAA see greater collection in the future, based on more recent court cases setting precedent for amounts to be awarded to the RIAA?
the companies that support the riaa just want money so make sure you check riaaradar.com to make sure the music you buy does not help a company that supports the riaa. While they continue to waste their money on lawyers stick it to them one lost sell at a time.
Police spends more money protecting your home than the value of merchandise in it.
Irrespective of whether music pirating is theft or not, the observation is question is irrelevant, and the "we can get away with it since it's too expensive to stop us" does not help the argument that copying music without restrictions should be legal.
Between the MPAA's style of Hollywood accounting and the RIAA doing things like this, their statistics are losing credibility fast. How about using that 16 million to pay those artists that have been "wronged" by those evil "pirates".
If the *AA want to really convince people that they are losing money and the "pirates" are in the wrong, they need to get their finances straight before they blame "pirates". If it costs you $16 million to collect $400K-ish, you are running at an extreme loss, chances are that "pirate" didn't cause $16 million in real damages, (or even $10 in damages...) and if the RIAA keeps shooting itself in the foot, eventually people will realize that the real thing harming artists isn't "pirates" but the record companies.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I'm not surprised, but this is just another example of bullshit expenses the big media companies use to cheat bands and performers. "Oh, look...we had to pay $300M in lawyers fees. Sorry, there's no profit left for you." When all the while they are just paying themselves.
You're not looking at the expense correctly. It's not revenue they're hoping to regain. If that was the case spending $16M to gain $391k is a losing deal and any idiot could see that.
This money was spent as advertising, to spread fear about. And for what they've got for their $16M, it's been a bargain.
Back when Napster ruled the nets and music was free and nobody was getting stripped of their entire future just to listen to Madonna, the music industry was looking at a pretty dire situation. Now significantly fewer people download music. I sure as hell don't. Too rich for my blood - I won't do it. From that point of view it is a win. There are plenty of people who now will pay for music rather than risk having the RIAA's pack of rabid lunatics take an interest in your life. Me, I simply do without. I won't fund these assholes, but I won't risk the future of my family just to hear Rush's latest album either. I simply abstain.
Remember the "music industry" is nothing more than privileged middlemen. They produce nothing. They are to music what a toll booth is to travel. The whole goal is to keep the scam going. Spending $16M to keep the status quo? Totally worth it. Look at their revenue generated during the period in which they spent the $16M. Pennies on the dollar.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Money recovered: $391,000
Lawyer cost: $16,000,000
Legal precedence, chilling effect, and erosion of justice & civil rights: priceless!
"In a rare outburst of subjectivity . . . ."
ahahaha what?
derp derpity derp derp derp derp derp
Boredom is bliss.
But I wonder if the message they are actually sending is if you're going to pirate, just be sneaky enough about it that they won't catch you doing it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Yeah, the recording/movie industry's accounting practices have been on /. a lot lately.
This is how they avoid paying the awarded damages to the artists they're supposedly fighting for---they write the $16,000,000 off as expenses!
Meh. It costs your loan shark money to track you down and whack you when you run. But he does it, because it keeps the other people in line.
How much you wanna bet that the difference is a tax writeoff?
C|N>K
No. Not everyone. Some of us know how absolutely and unarguably false and incorrect it is to claim it is remotely anything like theft. I'll just re-post my response to somebody else who was under the mistaken impression that you can "steal" intellectual property by downloading it:
Theft of intellectual property is in impossibility, by the very definitions of the words involved. The cost, or effort, of copying is also irrelevant.
When you give your money for the shiny piece of plastic, you are also granted license rights, that we The Peeps (aka Government), granted copyright holders to bestow upon others.
Only one thing happens when you "pirate" or receive a digital copy of a copyrighted work without compensating the copyright holder: Infringement . The definition, "A violation, as of a law, regulation, or agreement; a breach." does not, and never has, implied Theft which has the definition, "(Law) Criminal law the dishonest taking of property belonging to another person with the intention of depriving the owner permanently of its possession".
Now a copyright can be viewed as physical property, but that is the copyright itself. To permanently deprive somebody of their copyright means I somehow transferred those legal entitlements to myself and started receiving money and granting others license to use that work, per my newly and illicitly acquired intellectual property rights.
All of the analogies to physically stealing anything are complete and utter tripe based on fallacious logic, and deliberate misinterpretation of law. Content companies (derogatorily referred to as Big Media) would love to have the act of Infringement conflated with Theft. It serves their purpose to have the public incorrectly associate the two to accomplish fear mongering.
Of course the fact, that no college student or citizen has ever been convicted of theft of an MP3 seems to make no difference. Defendants are always sued for damages as it relates to the acts of infringement in a civil court and not a criminal court. No district attorney has ever prosecuted criminal charges against an ordinary citizen for what we consider to be piracy because it is pointless. It does not meet the definition of criminal levels of infringement which traditionally require intent to profit financially or large scale distribution. Those have been amended in recent times, but nonetheless, nobody has ever been prosecuted criminally for it, despite the fact that torrents and file sharing have involved distribution at what some consider to be large scale. Even if, IF, somebody were to be prosecuted, the crime would not be theft.
It makes very little sense, and I don't support piracy.
Once again, I hope some people are reading this and figuring it out.
... the lawyers always win.
... we can engineer more of this! :-)
I bet you love it when people shove thick cocks in your mouth, dontcha?
Now they can use this to justify $millions in damages (never mind the folks they sue could never pay that).
On a related note, am I the only one who won't buy Sony products due to their inability to work without layers and layers of draconian DRM? These corporations are so obsessed with jousting windmills that they are throwing millions of dollars away and losing millions of dollars of sales.
The MPAA/RIAA and all their constituents WILL go out of business eventually. They are clearly outdated, outmoded, and irrelevant in the internet age. Watching them choke to death on their own stupidity is both amusing and kind of fascinating.
If Sony is Japanese, does that make them ninjas? If so, THE PIRATES WIN!!!!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
"In a rare outburst of link whoring, I posted a link to my own blog on slashdot..."
If one party of the disputes paid $16M we can safely assume the other side has spent a fair amount. We can also safely assume that the US legal system, that is the US taxpayer, has spent a significant amount dealing with this: court time, judges, legal assistance, administrative support, jurors etc. This is court time and money not spent dealing with other matters, some of which you might consider of far more value.
Hopefully with the recent reductions in damages awards the financial incentive to chase the rats-n-mice of copyright infringement will go away and the public costs will follow.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
This week alone we've read about how Movies always end up in the red (even Harry Potter lost money) http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/10/07/09/1621218/Hollywood-Accounting-mdash-How-Harry-Potter-Loses-Money
and this one about how labels avoid paying musicians hasn't even fallen off the front page yet: http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/13/1737224/RIAA-Accounting-mdash-How-Labels-Avoid-Paying-Musicians
There's no way the legal expenses cost $16M in *REAL* money. RIAA uses internal lawyers. In fact, RIAA is just lawyers. They're paying themselves and once again, screwing the artists.
I mean seriously, to the "editor" who posted this (kdawson) would it kill you to put an ounce of fucking critical thinking into it before you post?
I'm sorry... I know this must come off as a "troll" ... maybe I'm reading too much slashdot or something.
to how the (music|film) industry use their contacts to screw the people who actually make something interesting by insuring slow-cousin-ted gets some money. I know 'slow-cousin-ted' managed to become a lawyer, rather than a "film wrapper" in this round, but same applies.
I always wondered how some insane serial killer/... could wake up in the morning, and not think "wow, maybe I overdid it last night". I feel that way when two beers in I decide to get honest. Look at the RIA* case - what sort of monster wakes up and decides to start this every day? ...in the end, the bleeding hearts and artists....
That is almost true, but let us not forget the "snake oil salesmen" that sell the DRM that can never do what it is promised it will do. Anyone that invests big money on software to perform DRM is throwing money at a lost cause. Where else can you get millions for handing the end user the media, the algorithm, and the encryption key, and expect them not to be smart enough to put them together? Or better yet, to even use a felt tip marker to defeat it? Oh, their solution is to make doing that illegal. Yet again the lawyers can all have a field day, and not just the ones working directly for the RIAA.
They could cut the price of the CD's by 50%, not pay for the DRM'ed media/software cost, time to manage the high tech drm-keying process, and save the misery of user support/returns, and still stand to make more money by just selling more music. The problem with that volume-selling concept as the RIAA sees it is the artists would make more money because there would be lower overall overhead expenses to deduct out of the revenue stream before paying out the remaining fraction of profits to the artist. The RIAA depends on this contrived overhead to reduce what is actually paid to the artists. More overhead, more profit at the top! I would hope the artists catch on to this concept one day and actually ask for a 'reality check' (the paper kind preferably) from the RIAA management.
... really like to know, is where does RIAA's money come from, it appears to me that lawyers are behind this.
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
Should be filed under LOL*
Yawn, E grade troll. Try and do better, no one is interested in weak trolls here, we have seen qaulity trolling.
So clearly they are not actually recouping 'damages' done to them, so this is basically evidence that they are doing this for spite/obviously they have the money to spare. I read some article today(may have been on /.) that the artists only pull in like 23$/1000$ on record sales. Idk how realistic that is but it backs up that the RIAA does not care about anybody or anything.
If the "recovered" amount is just judgments, the actual dollar amount received may be far less, depending on the defendants' ability to pay.
On the other hand, the lawyers will almost certainly get the full amount of their legal fees.
This is obviously a hoax, as ACs do not have mod points.
If you want to troll you will need to do a good deal better than that.
Now run along back to your class with the other 8 year olds and leave the adults to our conversation.
This video sums up part of your post pretty neatly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4
It is entitled "Copying is not theft"
Funny enough, there are 'techno remixes' of that song.
Enjoy!
I hope this wreckless and insane spending by the RIAA and MPAA KILLS THEM OFF. Their funding companies deserve death for their shameful attitude toward EVERYONE but their lawyers.
SCREW THE ARTISTS! (Every penny of the wasted $16 MILLION was earned by the work of artists).
SCREW THE CUSTOMERS! (DRM, Digital Rights Manglement, 'til it HURTS!!! Sue them 'till we die!)
SCREW THE BUSINESS! (2.4% Return on Investment! Looks great on the books. Tax writeoff!)
Idiots on the road to self-destruction.
"...are using up their infinite mod points to protect some of the stories more than others."
Doesn't even have to be that.
One person with 15 mod points(for me, that is about 75-80% of the time) can go back in your post history (further they go back in time, the less likely you are to notice it) and mod down 15 "+0" posts, knocking them all into the -1 state. Two people? 30 posts in negative land. Really, it takes very few people to completely ruin your reputation here...except the smart ones on /. know better--they actually read your posts rather then the fucking mod points.
Let it go. Most of us don't need moderation to know intelligence and wisdom when we see it.
And yeah...I could see Apple shills working the forums. I could see that quite clearly.
Since posting several comments which painted apple in negative light, I have lost my M1 and M2 privileges compeletely. It's gone forever
How do you know?
If mod points just didn't show up for you for an extended period of time, then it can actually be because you post too much (I believe that gets taken into account when giving mod points as well). Could it, perhaps, be, that you felt the urge to post a great number of critical comments to all those endless Apple-related stories lately?
If you're the one breaking the law and stealing then maybe you should be the one worried about where your cellmates will be sticking their cocks.
Can we not form a lawsuit, the People versus the RIAA, for this absurdity? A full-on class action lawsuit to put a final end to this TERRORISM?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
1) Become a lawyer, 2) Download tunes from p2p networks, 3) Profit!
If it’s wrong to DL you
Then my heart just won’t let me be right.
No, the problem with /. is that they still allow AC comments.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Thomas Jefferson knew how false and incorrect it was to equate copying with theft - roughly 200 years ago. One of his letters concerning patents made it clear that the fact that ideas were copyable was the very reason that they could NOT be property! (Property being a social invention to prevent conflict over the possession of something that is naturally scarce, like, say, a particular house. If there's no inherent conflict, if everyone can possess a copy, there's no need for Government to interfere and say "Person A can have a copy and Person B can't.)
U.S. patents and copyrights therefore are not a recognition of any sort of natural property rights in ideas and expressions. They are merely a utilitarian tool for encouraging authors and inventors to produce and publish more works, which must ultimately revert to fully-copyable public domain. That's why it is inaccurate to call illegal copying "theft"; there's no property being taken. That's why the correct term is "infringement" (which can be civil or criminal) of the artificial monopoly.
You mean the thieves? Oh..yeah...ok...gotcha.
This all could just be some Hollywood accounting.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I hate the RIAA as much as everyone here does. I'm against DRM as much as everyone here is. Now that said, this article is just anti-RIAA funboyism.
RIAA et al have always said that the main purpose of their lawsuits was not to get money from private persons --with the exeption of those few mass-sharing--, but rather to get people to realize that downloading illegally constitutes a punishable crime. This should in theory get people to buy more music.
I would guess that according to their math they believe that all these actions have been a success, because they probably claim that without their actions they would have lost much more than the 16M US$. At the same time, they will always claim that piracy is much more than what it is and try to lobby more power to them.
In the end, nothing new here. And this article is clearly missleading.
Not saying there is no problem, but my karma has been excellent since I started posting here on /. and I do tend to lash out against obvious trolls, shills and morons. And that includes iFans and Flash lovers. So it is possible to openly lavish vitriol and contempt on them and still be in good standing overall. Maybe /. should implement a visualisation of such "ideologic cleansings" to allow further analysis as to where the problem lies exactly.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
I really, really loathe these guys.
But do you really think it's not working for them? They've paid $16M to lawyers. For that amount they have received:
- nominal damages
- huge amounts of lobbying power with politicians ("look how much we're having to spend to defend our rights!")
- absolutely massive amounts of anti-piracy PR from their big media pals
- a hard to measure but very valuable creation of fear in the mind of the average file sharer
I'm sure I'm not alone in being distinctly more wary about file sharing than I was in, say, the era when Napster and Kazaa dominated.
I think for $16M they'd be delighted.
Of course, none of that negates the fact that a much, much, much better approach to selling media would be to make it affordable and DRM-free. Which is why, for example, I spend too much money at Good Old Games.
Read Pynchon.
Now if only the RIAA could find some way to make cloned human copies of their lawyers, so they would not have to pay their bills. They have good reasoning, that the lawyers charge way too much. Thats not bad right? I mean, they just made a copy and in no way are they affecting the first lawyers income! ;)
What is your point? You have identified a difference between copying and theft, as much as there is a difference between poisoning and decapitating.
In the end, the results are essentially the same: The victim loses money, as much as he (probably) dies in the simile. There is only a subtle difference between taking the money away right now, and preventing the copyright holder to earn it. When I copy music the artist (probably) doesn't sell a CD, and when some Chinese backyard firm makes counterfeit stuff, the original manufacturer (probably) doesn't sell their original stuff.
Of course, you could argue that some people wouldn't buy it anyway, so what's lost. But there are other people who would have bought it, if it were not so easy to just copy it. Opportunity makes the thief, as the saying goes.
So, IMHO copying IS theft, at least as far as the victim's property is concerned.
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
> Theft of intellectual property is in [sic] impossibility
[...]
> To permanently deprive somebody of their copyright means I somehow transferred those legal entitlements to myself
You are contradicting yourself. If you "permanently deprive somebody of their copyright", you have stolen their copyright. It is still very different from copyright infringement, so the rest of your point stands.
In a rare outburst of subjectivity
Eh? IS that supposed to be a joke? Since when have NYCL's posts been anything but subjective?
(Not saying that it's a bad thing, but still.)
This is what happened to me once. I posted something negative about C vs C++ in the linux kernel and got modded down to terrible karma. Since all my posts are now -1 nobody reads them, so I never get modded up and can never leave terrible karma land. So I left for Digg. Great system we've got here.
This makes me think of an old "Bloom County" strip. Seems Bill the Cat's sweat works as a super hair tonic, so the gang is collecting and selling it. Eventually the government says it's illegal and tries to stop the supply, driving everyone to work an underground black market. At one point the government is so proud of a shipment they stopped, which consisted of something like 0.000037% of the supply...but they treated it like a huge haul. The gov't booty was a few small boxes, meanwhile Opus has a massive stash on a fishing pole under the lake.
Actually some of my posts shoot to +5 then end up in +3 or even 0 ./ spergs?! Seems to be more likely than we think.
how long until
It makes very little sense, and I don't support piracy.
Once again, I hope some people are reading this and figuring it out.
Why? Frankly, while true, for 99% of the people out there, it's irrelevant. It's like saying, "oh, no, he infringed the distribution right, rather than the public performance right." Hell, while correct, it's like saying "that's not ice cream, it's iced cream." It ain't gonna win you any friends, and at the end of the day, the infringer still has acted illegally.
Crazy... I just read through whats available of your posting history, and its insane you're permanently -1.
If your intent was really trolling- you'd just go make another account, I guess thats lost on /. mods :-/
Dont worry, the lawyers have a new plan and this one is SURE to get the RIAA a decent return: Suing iPod owners who only listen to one earphone and let a friend pirate the music through the other without paying a dime! The people who use headphone splitters so that two listeners can get full stereo are going to pay octupal damages too!
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Out of curiosity, which posts sealed the deal?
You are not the entire internet, you are a statistical outlier. Sorry, but it's true. On the whole, counter-copyright downloading is apparently still on the rise. Plus you seem to be engaged in the "low and dumb" end of the pool if you've been "contacted twice" and didn't get enough details the first time to avoid the second via encryption, port hopping, "safe peer" or any number of other means.
Oddly enough I don't do any counter-copyright downloading and I already use these techniques just to stay out of the big net of stupid. I move non-trivial amounts of data so it would suck to be mistaken for a "warze kiddy".
I would bet, given no other information than provided, that they were never "Contacted by Rights Holders" at all. You ISP probably just didn't like you usage profile. Did they cite title downloaded and time performed or just call you naughty on an approximate date?
I feel your pain though. Guilty until proven innocent sucks, though you do seem to be admitting guilt.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
"except the smart ones on /. know better--they actually read your posts rather then the fucking mod points."
Not claiming to be especially smart - but that's how I read. I read the post, give it a thought, agree or disagree, and move on. It's hard to believe that there are those who spend their time modding up pro- (apple, *nix, Microsoft, copyright or whatever) posts, and modding down anti- (fill in the blank) posts. Such little people, with such little minds. You've got to feel sorry for them and their pathetic little lives.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It's your handle. Personally, I can't take anyone with that nickname seriously. Pimp. Dawg. Pimpdawg. The nick inspires contempt.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I think I might have figured it out. Are you using IE6? I think that I remember a rumor about dropping support for IE6, but I'm not sure if I heard the alleged rumor correctly.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Everyone knows that downloading is form of theft (of copyright materials) but a ton of people are doing it anyways.
I just downloaded the new Linux kernel. It is copyrighted, isn't it ? Oh dear, I just committed a crime.
Just show up a some doc's walk-in clinic and tell him you got one fuck of a case of angina. (Sorry R. Crumb. I couldn't resist. :-)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
How much money does the music industry make?
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_money_does_the_music_industry_make
40 Billion (no idea if that is accurate in anyway)
Convert to millions for fun: 40,000 Million
How much did the court cases cost? 16 Million
Its a drop in the bucket to try and perpetuate their current business model.
Its like the damages that BP will face... realistically the amount is nothing to them if you consider how much money they make. Call it a cost of doing buisness and move on.
Because they are two different things, and the one (theft) carries negative connotations in most people's minds of having their property taken away while the other (infringing intellectual property rights) means nothing to most people. The fact that the RIAA go even further and equate the latter with piracy, a crime still viewed in terms of punishment meted out as one of the worst on the planet today means we should take every opportunity to point out how ridiculous their arguments are by referring to it as infringement of intellectual property rights. Imagine you wound up in court for speeding but the judge decided to sentence you as if you'd committed grand theft auto on the basis that "at the end of the day, you've still acted illegally". Damn right the distinction makes a different to the infringers if the damages are being assessed by people who are buying into the lie. The RIAA are using marketing FUD techniques to try and make the crime sound worse than it is - but if the very crime itself is as bad as they claim, they shouldn't need to use such techniques to make it sound worse, it should stand on its own merits. They're taking every opportunity to mislead people, so as tedious as we might think the distinction is, we should take every opportunity to set the record straight (no pun intended).
Because they are two different things, and the one (theft) carries negative connotations in most people's minds of having their property taken away while the other (infringing intellectual property rights) means nothing to most people. The fact that the RIAA go even further and equate the latter with piracy, a crime still viewed in terms of punishment meted out as one of the worst on the planet today means we should take every opportunity to point out how ridiculous their arguments are by referring to it as infringement of intellectual property rights. Imagine you wound up in court for speeding but the judge decided to sentence you as if you'd committed grand theft auto on the basis that "at the end of the day, you've still acted illegally". Damn right the distinction makes a different to the infringers if the damages are being assessed by people who are buying into the lie. The RIAA are using marketing FUD techniques to try and make the crime sound worse than it is - but if the very crime itself is as bad as they claim, they shouldn't need to use such techniques to make it sound worse, it should stand on its own merits. They're taking every opportunity to mislead people, so as tedious as we might think the distinction is, we should take every opportunity to set the record straight (no pun intended).
And? The public doesn't care. In fact, based on the story today about truth, all these pedantic arguments do is cement the FUD.
The public knows that the infringer did something wrong. They don't know the proper name. When Slashdot rushes in to say "no, the name is wrong! The infringer did this, not that," it doesn't change the public's perception any... they still know the infringer did something wrong, and beyond that, really don't care. Further, unlike your grand theft auto/speeding comparison, the sentencing here is comparable. A better analogy would be something like conversion vs. trespass to chattel... and there, most people would again roll their eyes and say "who cares?"
"Why don't you just stop stealing other people's shit and the problem will solve itself?" -Anonymous Coward
Who exactly is afraid? It doesn't seem like any of it is stopping. Instead, consumers are demanding convenience of non-DRM'd lowest-price downloads, and content distributors are bending over backwards trying to entice and please the market, instead of being forced to pay $20 for a full CD. How is the RIAA winning here?
This never was about piracy. CD's as a format started to mature in the early 1990's, according to data from Sidney Shemel and M. William Krasilovsky's This Business of Music. In fact, in 1992, the Audio Home Recording Act was passed which made it permissible to make individual copies of your own catalog for personal use, and to some extent allowed sharing of those copies as long as it was directly with acquaintances as opposed to en masse distribution.
The real reason RIAA has been spending this money is because digital distribution isn't just a competitor with them at the retail level. It competes with them at the A&R level, too. Let me rephrase that... digital distribution is a threat to the distribution channel monopoly the recording industry has held since the 1940's. Artists can release, distribute, market and promote their own material without conventional record companies or distributors in the middle.
Granted, the move seems illogical since there's no keeping the digital revolution from making this take place, and on the obverse there will always be a demand for producers and record distributors to back the Britneys and Daughtrys of the world.
But one should never underestimate the stupidity-inducing effect of the American record executive's ego. In corporate America, many decisions are made on the fly without any real examination of a business plan. There's an Amon Goethe-kind of satisfaction some egotistical people get from having the authority to approve ridiculously uncalculated risks with multi-million dollar price tags.
But, rest assured, this perversion will in the long run bankrupt the industry and keep them blind to the changes coming ahead that will completely transform the way we search, acquire and experience music... and all other intellectual property.
Piracy, unfortunately, is not the answer... as it gives fuel to Congressional lobbyists from RIAA to pressure the legislative branch into enacting more dumb legislation. The real answer is to get behind those legitimate distribution media and support the models that work, that you do like with your pocketbook. This will send the only kind of message that companies and executives listen to. "Cha-ching!"
It never was. Sidney Shemel and M. William Krasilovsky, two music industry attorneys, wrote the bible on the industry called This Business of Music. They observed the maturation of the CD format as an inevitability in the mid-1990's. I also wrote a paper about the coming internet distribution possibilities in 1996.
Piracy is a growing threat a continuing decline in their bottom line, but that isn't the overall concern. The overall concern is the inevitable obsolescence of record companies themselves. Digital distribution cuts out so many middlemen in the distro monopoly that's been in place since the 1940's. It's got the potential to eliminate entire A&R departments, distributors, subdistributors, rack jobbers, one stops... the "record club" is already practically obsolete (remember Columbia House?).
So, the industry is changing and these guys realize that the older conglomerates aren't small enough, agile enough, to possibly ever compete in the more diverse space of internet distro. They don't understand it. They can't dominate it. So, they're throwing lawyers at every granny and twelve year old not to stop the inevitable shift, but to slow it down.
The problem is that piracy only gives them more ammunition to send lobbyists after Congress to get more dumb legislation passed like the DMCA. The real response to this? People need to speak with their pocketbooks and show the economic viability of the legit distro models that work, that they like, whatever, by purchasing through those models.
That will send a message to the record labels and to the marketplace in general in the only language that they understand... "Cha-ching!"
IBM's legal fees no doubt dwarf any possible judgment they'll ever receive from the SCOundrels in Utah, but failing to litigate would only encourage other failing software companies to go after Big Blue's deep pockets. The PR value of defending Linux from a would-be IP troll is also not to be ignored.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
I agree
I'm seeing digital album prices going back up to $12 or $13 again, they have to subsidize their "winning strategy"
"In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change" --Thich Nhat Hanh
the only people who win this game are the lawyers
Obviously: CITATION NEEDED
How do you expect records to unless you spend it on something else? You know, like the line in the contracts about "Legal Recovery Fees" or somesuch?
That is all.
This is a perfect excuse for the RIAA to charge artists a fee for legal battles over copyright infringement. Better yet, charge a fee per record sold. This way artists can never make any money.
... it doesn't seem to be parsing the [sarcasm] tag correctly.
At least in the 90s, some musicians were paid via plastic. Just like a corporate credit card... here's the gimmick.
Suppose your boss said, "sure, you'll be making about 120k per year salary. Instead of you mucking with the all the accounting yourself, take the corporate credit card and just charge it whenever you want to buy goods and services. Permitted use of this card, is your pay." Any over charge gets tacked on as an recouping expense of said "loan" described in the article... but here's the money maker.
Most people don't spend 120k (hypothetical value) per year, especially if they were poor before; even if they binge and purge and party as hard as they vision rich people doing. Talking of binging and purging, you get the artist high, so he cares more about high quality cocaine than a money market account, or a 30k dollar Rolex. Due to the agreements of pay, what he doesn't spend ends right back in the pockets of the record labels. What he does spend? That too, because the reality is, if anyone in Hollywood gets busted for drugs or prostitution and it gets put on the news; what we are seeing is the result of someone pissing off someone in the entertainment industry. They control a lot of those channels and adult entertainment industries (which should be obvious, the porn industry is part of the entertainment industry), the cost of a plate full of cocaine and a up-and-coming porn actress gets tacked on for living the rockstar/rapstar life style at market price. When, the girl works for the same people, two doors down the hall... walk from one set riding some guy, to this trailer riding that guy who thinks he's got girls crawling all over him because he's famous. (for the record, I would love for some of them to crawl on me... but the point is, he gets charged and the record company was in full control the whole time.) I bet Lindsey Lohan didn't want to have sex with some record exec... and now she's again crying before a judge.
So some of those record labels only needed to pay the artist, the exact amount of money to keep him incapacitated and distracted; it turns out, it doesn't cost a whole lot at all. (Hollywood does this too, with actors and actresses).
I can't say this added perk was extensively used throughout the recording industry, but it was used. It might still be used. But it's just one more underhanded way of getting one more dime from the artist.
It is a disgusting industry. It should be made illegal and everyone within it making more than 50K a year should go directly to jail for the rest of their life; no courts, no jury, no plea... just the clink of a jail cell.
That's some real interesting economics there. Dude, I can promise you that internal lawyers are not free. There are only a couple of possibilities: 1) the RIAA contracted with some legal firm for services. And paid them $16M real dollars. 2) RIAA looked at their staff, realized they didn't have a big enough legal staff to handle this, and hired a bunch of lawyers. And paid them $16M real dollars (some in the form of benefits). Or 3) they had sufficient slack in their internal legal department to just absorb this work (which seems highly unlikely), but even in this case, they still got a bunch of lawyers to do this work, and paid them $16M in exchange for it.
The bottom line is that when people do work for an organization, they charge to some charge code, and expenses get posted against that charge code. Whether they're internal or external (well, external types do it via invoice, but it's the same thing). It's not like internal people are working for free.
this statement "they don't really need an excuse" is a straw man argument.
Do they need an excuse to waste their own money? No. To be successful in convincing all of Congress? Yes. Evidence helps build their case for just how far they can twist the law.
Anything can motivate you to come after me for wearing hotpants, but can you convince an entire legislative body on your personal beliefs alone that it's worth banning hotpants over?
If you want to know what "piracy" is, I suggest you get in a yacht and take a slow trip down the coast of Somalia. When (if) you get back, compare that experience with downloading a string of bits from the internet.
Not the same thing at all.
Deadshits the lot of them.
.
Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
It seems that the biggest enemy of the RIAA is not the music downloaders, but their own lawyers who will bankrupt them sooner or later. I say let the lawyers finish the job, as they will bleed the RIAA dry and then leave the sinking ship like the profiteering rats they are.