RIAA Bits 319
HardYakka writes "The New York Times writes that record industry executives who are adamant that file sharing is stealing are not above stealing themselves." The NYT also has two other stories on file-sharing today: one with emphasis on musicians, and an opinion piece about the internet. Also floating around: this humor piece and an EFF petition.
Stealing by the RIAA (Score:5, Interesting)
What else can you call people being forced to give money to the RIAA through the use of threats?
Birds of a feather (Score:3, Interesting)
Hrmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps putting children to work in your cd factories might teach them that each song they steal is worth not the 1 cent it's pressed on, but thousands of dollars.
The Legal Process (Score:5, Interesting)
"Now as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen."
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Extortion [Re:Stealing by the RIAA] (Score:5, Interesting)
Just to be technical.
Stealing is taking by stealth. Robbery is taking by force. Extortion is taking by threat (Illegal use of one's official position or powers to obtain property, funds, or patronage).
New pirate born (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd never, ever downloaded music nor accepted a copy of a CD from a friend until the RIAA started issuing the subpoenas.Two wrongs don't make a right, but sometimes the second wrong (the RIAA actions) piss off the honest folks so much that they side with the original lawbreakers.
I wonder if anyone else, like me, has been driven to a life of crime - or at least a life of acts of civil disobedience - by the RIAA goons?
Re:Irony... (Score:3, Interesting)
Author's rights. (Score:3, Interesting)
There is music out there which the author wants shared. There is music out there which the author doesn't care if it's shared. There is some music out there which the author wants protected by copyright. The problem is that it is impossible to tell which music is which.
The filesharer is simply a hapless bystander who is caught-up in a legal quagmire. If the filesharers assume the work is protected by copyright then they are infringing the author's right to speak and be heard by willing listeners. If they assume the work is an act of free speech then they might be infringing the author's limited commercial copyright.
The question, then, is this: Ought the filesharer assume the work is a constitutionally protected act of free speech, or ought the filesharer assume the work is protected by an obscure federal statute giving limited commercial protection from copying?
Re:Welcome To The New World, Geek Fewl... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course this ancient and still going strong model is based on a certain principle. Namely that is a substantial part of the cost of the item being sold is the production of the item itself. So that producing X times the number of items will incur X times the cost or at least close to that. Although cost per unit tends to go down as the number of units goes up this is not a steep curve nor for that matter an infinite one no matter how the charts look. If it was then at a certain number of units the cost of production would fall to zero. Perhaps even go negative :)
What is outdated is the idea that this model applies to all things being sold. The technologies that made the internet possible have allowed some of the basics behind the cost of producing items to be changed. If it costs me X to produce a digital product then it doesn't cost me X*number of items. The cost of material and production capacity that ensures the rather smooth curve in the normal world is gone. Really the only thing keep the cost from being zero is the cost of distribution wich are low for digitals products.
Producing a billion or a thousand digital items makes no difference. This is new. Also new is that distribution costs are pretty much equel no matter the distence. I now have a truly worldwide audience. Compare this to the rather limited distance a product like say milk goes.
So for digital products a number of changes have occured.
there are lots of other differences but I think these alone make for the fact that we now can have a different business model. And that is the problem. Not that the old model is obsolete. It still works fine for products that are produced in the old way, no negative meaning being applied to old btw. What the record companies and for that matter most content suppliers have failed to realize that theyre products can use a new business method.
The silly thing is that music sharing is profitable for quite a number of companies. These are called ISP's and the telecoms. They make a bundle out of programs like napster. Or do you really need DSL/t3 to send email?
I for one am still waiting for the following. Every "record" store gets a computer with a couple of outlet points (cd burners firewire connections and such), some terminals, a big HD array say 1 terrabyte (very cheap if you use IDE, it doesn't have to be fast) and a connection to a central network (doesn't have to be the internet for security).
Then all that is needed is for every music owner to catalog their music and make it available on the central network.
I then browse the catalog in the shop and make my selections. Popular songs are already locally available while others are taking from the network, perhaps stored in a cache, and my selection is then burned or put on an mp3 player etc. I then pay the shopkeeper the fee.
Seems a simple enough solution. The shop has every piece of music ever sold on a wide va
Can we use the law against them and sue them? (Score:4, Interesting)
If someone has a name similar to that of their artist (or not), records some copyright material to mp3 and then puts it on the network. The condition is it is free for anyone to download, except the major record labels, their employees, agents, contractors or affiliates. By virtue of their copyright laws, they are not allowed to download it (aka steal it) and are subject to $1500 or $150,000 fine if they do.
All we need to do then is monitor the downloads of this mp3, and then sue the RIAA when they download it. If there is more than 216 of us doing this, then we can easily outweigh their laws and settle this similar to how the large companies settle patent lawsuits, you lower your weapons and we lower ours.
Build tools that sidestep the RIAA (Score:2, Interesting)
It downloads independent songs and you rate them.
There's more to it, and I recomend anyone who's tired of the RIAA to at least take a look.
Some of the downloads are a little slow, and it's an early version but I've already found some indie stuff I like.
This may be the direction we need to go.
Artists could get feedback and people are exposed to new music (minus the $20 per DECENT song tax;-)
Re:Very dim person (Score:2, Interesting)
"Musicians tend to make more money from sales of concert tickets and merchandise than from CD sales."
If we are concerned about whether file-sharing is robbing actual music creators of $ then Read the Musicians article! It speaks of how the musicians themselve rarely recieve any royalties from CD sales.
Time for a change in laws......
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/technology/14MU
Re: RIAA Bits (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Something I've never understood... (Score:3, Interesting)
While this is generally seen in the negative, how about the fact these students help in highlighting the good work published out there on the internet? All we have teach them is to give credit and not lift an idea word to word. Sadly the university evaluation system gives no encouragement or credit for having recognized a good idea. Thus the power of the internet is highlighted in the negative light
Cut out the fat (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Birds of a feather (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't mind cd prices being high but again that is because the Internet gives me an alternative. I'll continue to download music instead of buying it until they lower cd prices. They can make threats until they go blue in the face and it won't change the fact that as long as they overcharge they'll be lossing out on sales. I don't need to feel guilty about the artists because I can support them by going to concerts and buying tshirts and posters and such. This whole thing is essentially consumers refusing to be ripped off.
I'll also disagree that people can live without music. That is a dumb concept that I hear often. Music, movies, tv, artwork, etc may not be needed to stay alive but it is needed to keep our culture alive. Without expossure to such things people will go off on their own tangents and not unify in the building of our society. Shared artwork is part of shared experience and binds us together. It also seeds new ideas in other minds so that we can keep producing. So, in general, it's a bad idea to try to limit who can be exposed to our shared culture.
You're exactly right that the RIAA is doing exactly what businesses do. I don't know if I'd call what they're doing stealing but it is greed and shortsighted. That is what pure capitalism is. Which is part of why we have anti-trust laws. Unfortunately those laws are not really functioning so there is little balance to huge corporations that would suck the rest of the world dry. I think of the economy as an ecosystem. It's good for the ecosystem to have strong species that thrive. It becomes very bad though for one species to thrive to such a point that it's killing off many other species. Monopolies are the economic equivilant of human beings burning down rain forests.
Re:Something I've never understood... (Score:3, Interesting)
If anybody should care, other than the original author, it should be the students doing it. Are they learning as much from copying as writing? Maybe they are, if they are actually reading to find what is best to copy, and if so what is the problem?
Of course I still think schools should not be allowed to grade their own students or issue them degrees. I'd rather see a sepperation between teaching and certification. Such that when you'd finished school you'd have to take a battery of tests from a third party to verify you'd learned everything required to get your degree. In such a case it really wouldn't matter if the student copied on their papers or not as long as they had learned everything required.
Re:Hrmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Welcome To The New World, Geek Fewl... (Score:2, Interesting)
1) The RIAA and Co exist because they hold a monopoly and are able to abuse that monopoly position to suck big dollars out of the system through what looks like inefficiencies. Your proposed system is way too efficient, there isn't enough cover for the RIAA to hide their cash extraction activities. So, it means death to the RIAA just as much as unchecked napster.
2) If you can provide infinite inventory to a brick & mortar store via the internet, you can do it to people's homes too. Digital music isn't tied to the physical CD medium anymore (as you yourself already explained), mp3 players are smaller, lighter and play longer than cd players and that trend will only continue. So you don't even need a cd burner to effectively "buy" music.
Re: It IS a double standard (Score:3, Interesting)
Talk about doublespeak! I found this post just downright amazing. I was flabbergasted!
It is a double standard. What you describe is exactly a double standard. When someone is supposedly so against something, at least in front of their peers, but then they support those who do it, or at least condone it, this is the very definition of a double standard.
Re:Birds of a feather (Score:2, Interesting)
The sad thing is that musicians usually have to foot the bill for recording sessions, which can run upwards of several thousand an hour. Not cheap. The artists are getting gouged, without much choice. I have never and will never produce a CD that gets distro'd by an RIAA member label.
Re:Extortion [Re:Stealing by the RIAA] (Score:3, Interesting)
You usually don't steal the mailman, or rob the money.
So the RIAA could legitimately be stealing money, because it's very simple to "steal the bag" right in front of its owner, even though you're "robbing" that owner of his bag.
Re:RIAA Detention Centers (Score:1, Interesting)
As morals continue to decline we are getting close to an irreversible collapse in freedom. Notice how we are becoming more of a police state every day?
Freedom cannot work without responsibility. Responsibility requires honesty. Honesty requires morality.
I'm not a 'right-wing' nut just a little right of center, and I do not like Ashcroft either. But I do enjoy freedom and do understand how it works.
I use a simple analogy when I explain freedom to children, sometimes adults too.
Freedom is like the penny tray at the corner convince store. Everyone is allowed to use it, but if too many people take the pennies there will be none left for anyone else. Even though you are not required to 'contribute' it will help keep freedom alive for others if you do. If people stop putting pennies back, the tray will be taken away.