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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)
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.
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.
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.
"...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.
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.