RIAA Denies Hypocrisy in Royalties Dustup

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.'"

Presumably one of the Vatican's new deadly sins

[giafly]

Polluting of the environment, genetic modification, carrying out experiments on humans, causing social injustice, causing poverty, becoming obscenely wealthy and taking drugs all constitute mortal sins, according to Girotti.

Vatican dusts down deadly sin list [businessgreen.com]

Actually at least six of these new seven deadly sins apply to the RIAA, starting with "polluting the environment".

Re:Deadly sins?

[bagboy]

True.. but gluttony fits there "smorgashboard-all-you-can-eat" mentality when it comes to ways of skimming off the top.....

Good little capitalists

[Anonymous Coward]

The RIAA wants to maximize its revenue streams while minimizing costs.

All businesses strive for this. This is the holy grail of capitalism. This is what makes a business successful. There is nothing hypocritical about it.

There is a fuzzy area between greed and self-interest. The accusations "they are making too much money" or "they are charging too much" or "they are paying too little for their resources" are all pretty baseless in a free market.

The accusations "they are monopolizing their market," or "they are introducing artificial scarcity" or "they are erecting artificial barriers to entry to their market" are all very valid accusations, from a capitalistic perspective, because these things destroy a free market and prevent others from being good capitalists.

I think the RIAA is guilty of all six of the above accusations, but only the last three have any real merit in the secular world (IMO).

As an aside, "causing poverty" is SUCH a gimme. Anything that involves the accumulation of a scarce resource can be seen as "causing poverty." We are all, and always will be, guilty of that deadly sin, the Church included.

Re:Fourteen deadly sins

[mjwx]

Ayn Rand was a hack and a plagiarist.
The whole idea of atlas shrugged was taken from the idea of using guilt as leverage in religion. Here's an oft quoted part changed to fit a religious context:

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power the Church has is the power to punish sinners. When there aren't enough sinners, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a sin that it becomes impossible for men to live without sin.

. The whole idea is to make people think they are doing bad things in order to lay guilt on people. The Church also provides a convenient way to eliminate guilt in exchange for belief (not to mention nominal donations). The Church would happily consider alcohol a drug because then a few quiet drinks with friends becomes a horrible crime in the eyes of the priests, the thing is they don't want you to stop, they want you to keep "sinning" as it is the only thing that can keep you coming back to them for forgiveness.

People wonder why some governments (as in the US govt) has such a close association to the church.