BusinessWeek Takes On the RIAA 241
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "BusinessWeek magazine has gone medieval on the RIAA, recounting in grisly detail the cruel ordeal to which the RIAA has subjected a completely innocent defendant, Tanya Andersen of Oregon. Nobody can read the story and come to any other conclusion than that the RIAA and its lawyers are total jerks. Of course we've been reading about Atlantic v. Andersen on p2pnet.net and on my blog, and discussing it here, but there's something extra special about a mainstream publication like Business Week really letting them have it."
Re:Let's Stand Up - A Call to Action (mildly O/T) (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Let's Stand Up - A Call to Action (mildly O/T) (Score:4, Informative)
Why don't we, through /., set up a site, aggregate information about similiar cases and build up a body of evidence to "[...] show that the RIAA engaged in serial bad-faith lawsuits [...]". In the long run, the space could serve as a place for debate on the current copyright regime, the inflated monetary value assigned to the songs/movies downloaded, etc.
Re:It's worrying actually (Score:5, Informative)
The difference is, of course, that we're on to them now. Although the scenario you describe may have used to work, the 'net is putting a crimp in such plans. The web allows "regular people" to interact and organize at almost no cost. We can share information via blogs like Slashdot, p2pnet and Recording Industry vs. the People. The article says that Anderson "searched the Net for a case like hers." Her lawyer can use the 'net to find and communicate with other lawyers who are fighting the same fight to share advice and strategy.
The 'net helps even the playing field. Think about Sony, still recovering from getting their asses handed to them over the rootkit debacle, backing off on their plan to charge extra for a crapware-free PC http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/03/sony-pay-an-ext.html [wired.com] within a day of the news hitting the intertubes.
Go read the stories on the Consumerist http://consumerist.com/ [consumerist.com] about customers using the 'net to get refunds on bad deals and real service from fake "service departments" from the likes of Sears, Citibank, and Comcast. (Well, maybe not Comcast.)
The Internet, like the printing press, is a transformative technology. That means nothing is ever going to be the same. You and I already know it and sooner or later Big Business will, too. For an excellent book on the power that the 'net brings us, check out Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.
Re:Let's Stand Up - A Call to Action (mildly O/T) (Score:3, Informative)
Because that would take away from precious time ogling the latest Star Trek film or signing petitions to stop Uwe Boll from making movies. d:
It's surprising - I just read a transcript of a talk by Clay Shirky titled Here Comes Everybody [herecomeseverybody.org] which talks about the 'cognitive surplus' that we have these days - and how the potential exists for large-scale distributed social projects to grow, given the rampant free time which exists with our four/five day working weeks.
Once you have a rough plan, you would have to find people with the talents you need who are willing to help on their free time. Projects like this (ones where people don't get paid) often have staff members that abandon ship faster than a rowboat full of Cuban refugees at the Florida coast. Anyone working on it would have to document/comment everything appropriately so their inevitable successor can continue their work.
More important than the underlying technology would definitely be planning for and accomodating the 'rowboat nature' of this project, yes.
What can you do? Well, if you wanted to fill the ambiguous position of "Project Lead", you can start by registering a .com and getting some decent hosting for the site. Again, you'll need a plan ahead of time aside from a few paragraphs in a /. comment to get some people to get on board with the project.
Well, for me, /personally/, it's not completely out of the blue - it's really the culmination of plenty of thought on copyright and the desire to do _something_, but never really knowing how my limited HTML/CSS skills could take on teh mighty Empire!
If anybody's interested, do chime in - I have some hosting and I could afford to register a .com/.org.
Oh, and ;-) [yahoo.com]
Re:It would be a good thing... (Score:4, Informative)
The movie/book might not be entirely objective, or cover all bases as well as it should, but I thought it would be relevant in reference to the debate about giving corporations "the rights of a mortal man" as the previous poster wrote.
Re:Interesting choice of words (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It would be a good thing... (Score:3, Informative)
You mean something like this?
http://www.riaaradar.com/ [riaaradar.com]
Re:It would be a good thing... (Score:4, Informative)
The OP is wrong. We pay for lots of things long after they're created, based on a theory of credit or cost spreading. For example, a bank pays the people who built your house up front, because most people don't have that kind of cash sitting around to do it themselves. You pay the bank for 30 years. The job is done.
You pay insurance premiums every month even though the agreement was created years ago. The insurance company isn't actually providing you with hundreds or thousands of dollars in service every month. You can only afford to have insurance because millions of other people are sharing the cost with you. You pay that bill, even if your lifetime payments actually add up to more than the policy limit, and even if you never actually make a claim. If you buy a big-ticket item on credit and pay it down over time, your credit card company is profiting from a purchase you made months ago (profit far exceeding their opportunity costs for advancing you the money in the first place). When you buy into a co-op or timeshare, you're paying for something that was probably paid off years ago and is now just profit.
Buying a copy of a copyrighted work for $10 or $15 is like buying stock in the work. You never own the "company" with your single share, but you do own a tiny piece of it. If you buy enough shares, you can take over the company and do what you want with its work, including blowing your money by giving it away. The market has placed the value of a typical album at several million dollars, and a typical film at dozens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. If you actually took out a loan and bought the whole thing, then yes, OP would be correct to complain about being asked to pay continuously. But since one person doesn't continually pay, and since the work is worth more than the $15 for the first DVD, the rant is, well, misguided and wrong. You wouldn't be able to afford CDs and DVDs if millions of other people didn't pay small amounts for it over the years as well.
If you'd like to round up $50 million to buy and truly own a motion picture and never have to worry about copyrights again, knock yourself out. Otherwise, deal with they profit from sales above and beyond what they need, just like every other profitable business.