RIAA Co-Opts More Universities

southpolesammy writes "The Register reports that six more US Universities and colleges have agreed to enter into protection schemes with the RIAA. In short, several institutions have signed deals with the RIAA's lapdog, the Napster music service, to 'goad these schools toward becoming music brokers'. The underlying threat of being sued by the RIAA if they don't pay them off is almost certainly the driving force behind their acceptance of this scheme. And of course, there's the ever-present gag order they'll probably enforce on these new universities as well. Great business model guys. Way to engender yourselves to your biggest customer base."

Mandatory payment?

[oostevo]

Universities helping their students to see that paying for IP is a good thing is something almost no one can argue with, but I'm not thrilled with the way many universities handle students' 'payment'.

I remember another university that tried to have students pay a mandatory "MP3 Fee" with their tuition for access to Napster because they figured that they'd download music anyway. Needless to say, that wasn't very popular with the students there.

I sure hope these universities don't follow suit.

Re:WHY....

[Otter]

Can't the RIAA, MPAA, and everyone else just realize that there is an efficient medium for distributing music, movies, and any other digital/converted to digital media, and WORK WITH IT?

Actually, that's precisely what's happening in this story, the submitter's furious ranting about "lapdogs" and "protection schemes" notwithstanding. As a fringe benefit, the universities' networks will return to pre-Napster (old Napster, obviously) levels of functionality.

Re:Streaming = Downloading?

[LesPaul75]

There are already lots of tools out there to do this. Most of the freeware MP3 players support it. The MP3 format is designed for streaming... In fact, streaming audio stations, like the ones on Shoutcast, are using MP3 format directly. Any player, including WinAmp, could simply save the streamed data directly to disk. They just disable that feature in WinAmp (as an attempt to stay out of the RIAA's crosshairs, I'm guessing).

Re:our daily allowance of Timothy, in disguise.

[DunbarTheInept]

Wake me up when there's a legitimate threat to my rights, or real technology news. Not teenage "I wanna swap music" teenage angst.

They're trying, but apparently you would rather roll over and keep on sleeping comfortably. Whether you realize it or not, suppression of a technology medium because of the way it is being abused by some (instead of suppressing JUST the abusive usage alone), is real technology news, and is a suppression of rights.

Um...

[rd_syringe]

..Can't the RIAA, MPAA, and everyone else just realize that there is an efficient medium for distributing music, movies, and any other digital/converted to digital media, and WORK WITH IT?

You mean P2P? Like Napster?

People will find better, more secure ways to transfer music/movies over the net, these associations need to embrace these technological advances and come up with an updated business model for them to profit off of.

Ah, the "new business model" argument. Isn't that what Napster's pay-for-P2P service is? Isn't that what iTunes is? The days of claiming the record labels aren't embracing these technologies is over. They are. It's the pirates who aren't embracing these technologies.

RIAA demographic target is just exploding!

[Simonetta]

I read in Variety that music recording sales are up 7% from last summer. Hurray for them.

But take into consideration that the target demographic for music sales is growing at more than that rate. Music sales is a young person's game: most buyers of music recordings are between 15 and 25 years old. This is the fastest growing segment of the world's population. Plus incomes are growing in formerly poor and desperate areas of the world. This means that even if the RIAA companies did nothing or completely goofed up their marketing, they would still have the 7% sales growth at least. There are 7% more people in the demographic band than last year.

The fact that record sales are not growing as fast as the demographic band proves that the record company executives are totally incompetent and undeserving of their seven figure compensation packages. Most of the young people who buy CDs live in the third world where they have a choice of paying $25 US for an official CD or $2-3 for a 'pirate' version.

Now the CD industry has NO marginal costs (blank CDs cost $0.05 each in bulk) per additional unit of product sold. That means that the RIAA companies are giving away their most profitable market sector to the pirates by not charging $2-3 per CD disk in the developing countries where the young people of the emerging middle-class don't have a lot of disposable income for music recordings.

The record company executives should all be fired for being too stupid to figure this out or too greedly and inflexible to adjust their business plan to maximize their revenues.

Sueing people in the 'finished development' world (the USA, EU, Japan, Canada, Aus...) is just a side-show to hide the incompetence of the Music dept execs from the head media corporate execs.

The population figures say that global music record industry should be booming with profits in 2004. If it's not, it's not because of file swappers.

Re:In other news...

[vegetablespork]

It's not dollar-for-dollar at all. That's a gross misconception. Parent and student assets are indeed looked at, but even past the protection allowances built into the formulae, the percentage of assets considered part of the "expected family contribution" never comes close to 100.

But don't take my word for it. The formulae used in Federal need analysis are public and available here [ed.gov] (PDF).

Re:RIAA demographic target is just exploding!

[rickbrodie]

I believe this has already been attemptet in britain. The website cdwow.co.uk tried (legally, i might add) importing cds from the continent and selling them for about £8.99 as opposed to the highstreet price of £13.99+. They were made to stop very quickly and nobody has attempted to try this (still perfectly legal, i might add) model again.