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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.
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!!!!!!
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.
Our household has been contacted a couple of times by our ISP for downloading shows through bittorrent. They said they were contacted by rightsholders. If we are "reported" again, we will lose our connection. As they are the only game in town (outside of satellite) we have stopped.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
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.
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!
You don't need to stop at all. Just alter you traffic. Get a hosted torrent account, which come at very reasonable prices, and just use SSL FTP, HTTPS, or SFTP to transfer the shows from your host account to your house.
Extremely Effective.
As far as the ISP is concerned, your traffic is now coming from a single IP address, a couple of connections, and is encrypted so they can't look at it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
i'd trust a loan shark more than i'd trust an international bank.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
"...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.
Duh: https://www.ipredator.se/ It is the VPN run by thepiratebay.
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?
It doesn't matter since the RIAA won't see a red penny from any of those cases -- Jammie Thomas is unemployed and wouldn't be able to pay a 10k settlement let alone 220k or 1.92M. The same applies to Tenenbaum - they might be able to recover a couple of bucks, but he can still choose to go the path of personal bankruptcy.
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.
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.
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.
Three points:
First, paying money to a hosted torrent provider to avoid paying money for media doesn't entirely make sense, unless the poster in on some kind of moral crusade against media companies (which I can understand but don't support).
Second, the ISP won't have been detecting copyright infringement by monitoring the poster's traffic, it will have been picked up by the media company's representatives joining a torrent and logging the participating IP addresses. Moving to a shell account adds an extra link in the chain, but it's still (presumably) traceable to the poster.
Third, as far as the media companies are concerned it's not really about cutting every alleged infringer off, it's just about cutting off/scaring off the majority. I doubt even the RIAA etc are quite so stupid as to believe that *every* illegal download can be prevented. Of course, making downloading more difficult cuts both ways, e.g. can the media companies be bothered to make the extra effort to track down people using torrent hosting accounts?
https://alephnull.uk/
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?
There are only 2 precedents on the challenge to the RIAA's damages theory. Both are lower court cases, so neither is binding. In both cases the defendants were found to have infringed deliberately and wilfully, and to have engaged in additional conduct to cover up their actions.
In both cases the Court found the maximum recoverable to be $2250 per infringed work.
In both cases the Court noted that it probably would have awarded less than $2250 were the decision the Court's, rather than a jury's.
Since most RIAA cases involve 6 or 7 allegedly infringed mp3's, and since it costs hundreds of thousands to litigate a federal case, I doubt the RIAA is thrilled with these decisions.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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!"