Senator Cautions Those Tempted By RIAA Amnesty Offer
from the everyone-says-stay-away dept
Okay, this really wasn't supposed to be "bash the RIAA" day, but there are backlash articles appearing everywhere. The latest is that even Senator Norm Coleman (who used to have the RIAA's new chief, Mitch Bainwol as his campaign head) is telling people not to fall for the RIAA's amnesty offer, saying that doing so, "may not be the best approach to achieving a balance between protecting copyright laws and punishing those who violate those laws." When even the guy he helped get elected is questioning the RIAA CEO's plans, you have to wonder how well thought out they were.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
RIAA Bashing?
Maybe their right, maybe their customers are terrorists. Maybe we'd all be better off with life imprisonment without parole for buying their music. Better yet, maybe they should just set their sights a little higher, maybe Al Gore, Vint Cerf, and all the other creators of the internet need to be arrested and jailed for creating a tool to facilitate copywrite infringement. Oh, better yet, God and the satan should both be arrested and jailed, because the satan created evil, and God created our brains, which is obviously a tool used to facilitate copyright infringement. Then again, putting their lord and master, satan, in jail might not be a good career move.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: RIAA Bashing?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Piracy beside the point
Their only point is that copying music without permission is illegal. We get this. It's not necessary to expound upon this because it's beside the point entirely.
Sure, the sharing networks are currently being used mostly to do something that is arguably wrong. A little bit wrong individually, and maybe greatly damaging in the aggregate. (That's maybe damaging, opinions on this can differ intelligently.)
But piracy isn't what's going to destroy the recording industry. They will be destroyed by the first company that comes along that puts music into the sharing networks on purpose, as part of their non-distribution-related business plan.
The record labels of the future will be companies that service artists needs. They'll provide studio facilities at various tiers of pricing and with various levels of engineering expertise available, probably for a flat hourly fee, no royalties. They'll provide PR, again not as the owner of the content, but as a service company, just like a present day PR firm. They'll help the artists schedule gigs, manage their time, book flights, print CDs and more, acting in the role of executive assistant to the artist. And the most important thing they'll do, before and above all other things, is to get the artists songs onto the sharing networks.
This is obviously a vision of a leaner industry, probably made up of smaller and more numerous entities. And without much room for all the fat that the current industry supports. This last is likely to be the source of the pathological blind spot they seem to have about the future.
Mike has been trying to do the recording industry a huge favor for years, by giving them excellent free advice. The industry has a lot of knowledge and expertise that will continue to be useful to artists for the forseable future. They should leverage that to build a business that will survive. One that doesn't have distribution as the sole source of income. And, of course, doesn't include the usury of the present day record 'deal'.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Why thieves make bad business strategists
No. We all know what's happened. It's the convenient and ubiquitous availability of free, illegally copied music. In this regard the common person has become a criminal, and it is not only ironic, but typically shallow of the common person to feel that his wrongfulness is diminished by the simple fact that so many other people are doing the wrongful deed too.
Those same people now rant about the "insensitivity of the recording industry." Insensitivity, you declare? My god. Take a look at the stuff on your hard drive and show some damned humility. That $1.5 billion per year doesn't just end up in some rich executive's pocket. It employs literally thousands of people...err...it DID employ thousands of people. And those jobs are going fast simply because stealing got so convenient.
So if anybody thinks the RIAA is insensitive, consider that they are trying to protect the disappearing livelihoods of thousands of people, and that the self-serving desire to be groovin' to free tunes is no better conceived or directed than mere masturbation.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Why thieves make bad business strategists
Markets change. Businesses need to change with the times, not sue their customers.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Why thieves make bad business strategists
Your point is really more convenient (and self-serving) than apt: that if technology makes it sufficiently easy to steal property, then property rights become obsolete.
I would only ask that you provide me with your home address so I can show you how easily I can make YOUR property rights become a thing of the past.
Study: 1) how capital is formed, and 2) how much you yourself depend on it and benefit from it.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Why thieves make bad business strategists
My point isn't self-serving. I don't use file sharing networks at all. I have no music on my computer that I do not own on CD. I don't commit music copyright infringement.
My point is designed to help the music industry realize that the market is changing thanks to new technologies, and that they need to adapt. If they don't, they will die. It's that simple. There are business models around giving away music for free. Just because you think an obsolete business model needs to stick around doesn't mean the market is going to agree with you.
I would suggest that YOU study a little bit about the economic nature of digital goods, and the fact that copying a digital good is not theft. Digital property rights and tangible property rights are completely different. If you broke into my house and stole my furniture, I would be left without furniture. If I made a copy of your music, we'd both have the music. That's simply not the same thing.
Do you really not see the difference?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Why thieves make bad business strategists
All the RIAA is doing is guaranteeing that file sharing will get worse until either they wise up and embrace it or the music industry collapses under it's own lumbering weight.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Why thieves make bad business strategists
The market for music hasn't changed, and music isn't becoming obsolete like the buggy. It is only the methods of distributing music that are being obsoleted by technological advances. So your example is not analagous.
end quote
OK how about the train operators? When trucking became a big deal, and freight started being moved by trucks the train companies got left out. The methods of distributing goods changed, but the companies that own the goods didn't die. They changed their proccesses to have loading docks etc to load trucks, and got rid of train sidings etc to load trains.
Lots of people lost their jobs at the train companies. Some railroad companies were able to adapt, and became transport companies. Transfering freight in many different manners (truck, train, air, ship). Some didn't and had to layoff alot of people, and some had to close down.
Lets outlaw trucks becuase they took jobs away from people that worked on the railroad.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Why thieves make bad business strategists
I'll bet RFID chips would solve these problems ... lol
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Why thieves make bad business strategists
I'll bet RFID chips would solve these problems ... lol
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The Recording Industry must like fskcing it's arti
So... today was kind of the breaking point for me. I decided that if I can't share music anonymously with "friends", I was going to get creative and work on other ways of ripping the music that interestes me (and please note that:
1 - I own most of the music I share
2 - I live in a country where CD rentals are legal (costs about $2 per cd for a 3 day rental).
...So, I learned how to use two very useful utilities today: Streamripper and Total Recorder. Used in conjunction with peercast and shoutcast, I have 5 background streamripper32 streams a ripping in the background with I rip a 6th stream that I listen to on Peercast. In lettle less than 4 hours, I have accumlated several hundred tracks already. After I have filtered out the crap from the good stuff, I'll spin up a peercast channel.
The really weird thing that P2P/stream ripping has caused me to realize is that I actually like remixes better than originals. I mean it's kind of obvious. Originals are somone in a studio mixing room vision... remixes, on the other hand, have multiple infinite possibilities what extend already polished works. It's obvious which is going to more enjoyable to listen to.
I really don't think the RIAA understands exactly what kind of pissed off hell-spawn their creating with their antics. Indeed, at this point, it is my desire to see all artists that fall under the RIAA flag to suffer the most devistaing and severe economic hardships possible.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]