RIAA Denies Hypocrisy in Royalties Dustup 85
Hairless ape writes "The RIAA is reacting to a story pointing out the group's hypocrisy in its attempts to have songwriter royalties lowered. The issue stems from attempts to get webcasters to pay fixed royalty rates. 'In short, the contention was that the RIAA wanted to pay a percentage of its revenue to songwriters as its profits have fallen, but pushed for a fixed per-stream when it came to earning money from webcasters.' The RIAA says that's not so, and that SoundExchange offered a similar model to webcasters. Either way, the rates sought by the two groups would have bankrupted many webcasters. 'Now you know; it wasn't about hypocrisy, but one of the seven deadly sins may still have been involved.'"
At least it is legal (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fourteen deadly sins (Score:2, Insightful)
#2, human experimentation. What's wrong with medical research, psychological research, etc.?
#3, #4, #5 need definition
#6, punish success and all suffer
#7, only the drugs you don't happen to like. Does everyone agree on which drugs are bad?
Re:Presumably one of the Vatican's new deadly sins (Score:2, Insightful)
A little off topic, but why am I suddenly reminded of all those AOL CD's?
Re:Deadly sins? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe now... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fourteen deadly sins (Score:3, Insightful)
Why the painfully inane comments today? (Score:5, Insightful)
I came into this thread with 10 shiny new mod points hoping to find someone insightful, but found not a single comment in the entire thread worth promotion. What's happened to slashdot? A story on a hot subject, and I see nothing but off-topic trolls and insipid banter about deadly sins taken out of context from the description at the top of the page. Not a single comment on the actual article.
Anyway, the RIAA's attempt to dodge the charge of hypocrisy is equally lame. First the new deal gives ridiculous profit to SoundExchange (30% of gross). And even though they do have a 'plan' to share with artists (an inequitable one, albeit), the lack of expediency is directly adding to the profit of the RIAA through this process. The artists are clearly an afterthought. The RIAA can't come close to hiding their real motivation: profit for its members at all costs, regardless of artists rights/needs.
Hypocrisy is a rhetorical toy/attack dog (Score:-1, Insightful)
For example, consider the assertion "When Mary goes to the store to do her shopping, she should ask for a reusable bag instead of plastic ones. But when Jack went to the store the other day and asked for plastic bags for his shopping, that was quite okay."
The key here is the concept of "Similar", and how it "unsimilar" situations are NOT hypocritical.
Let's consider the events that led up to the claim. For example, that Jack was going to leave the country the day after and move to a remote island. In that case buying a reusable bag would have been meaningless, because he would never have been able to use it again. So it would not be a similar situation, and so it would not be hypocritical of him to get plastic bags.
Let's say that Jack was actually just going to move to Canada, and so he would have to bring his reusable bag with him in a small car. This situation is somewhat similar. Some people would think the claim would be hypocritical, others would not.
Let's say that Jack was in a really big hurry for a good reason and so didn't have time to ask for and pay for reusable bags from the till person. This situation is quite similar to Mary's, and so many people would think the claim is hypocritical. Not everyone.
Everything therefore depends on whether the situations are SIMILAR, because if they are, you MUST apply the same rule, but if they are not, then you don't have to.
However, in the material reality we live in, no situation is ever IDENTICAL to any other, because of the fractal-like state of events. You will therefore always be able to find some difference between any two cases X and Y. The question of how significant that difference is is up to individual interpretation, and individual interpretation is up to presentation, oratory, language used, etc. An accusation of hypocrisy will therefore try to present as minimal the differences between X and Y, while the defense is to maximise them.
To the extreme, you can accuse anyone of being a hypocrite because you can take any two concepts and abstract them to be identical. Ex:
* "Obama is a hypocrite - he claims to stand for personal freedoms, but wants to take away the freedom of a company executive to outline his view and present it to politicians".
* "Clinton is a hypocrite - she claims to stand for personal freedoms, but wants to take away the freedom of choice of not paying for someone else's medical bills".
* "McCain is a hypocrite - he claims to stand for personal freedoms, but wants to punish people for exercising that freedom to aid Hugo Chavez"
Re:Presumably one of the Vatican's new deadly sins (Score:2, Insightful)
From their argument, they are implying that consumers are only buying individual songs, but that they, the overly generous music labels are paying songwriters and musicians as if we bought the whole album.
Revenue may be down, but payouts are down as well. The music industry hasn't been lowering the price of CD's OR lowing the price of individual songs on iTunes or Amazon. If anything, the majors 'profit margin' has increased, because they have significantly lower expenses AND get significantly higher revenue [as a percentage of the retail price] of digital downloads.
This 'proposal' is just a straight money grab, plain and simple.