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."
It would be a good thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good on you (Score:5, Insightful)
Contradictions (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny thing is, that I think their first statement is actually right. The damages are "incalculable" since they quite often used flawed studies, doctored data, fallacious logic, etc. to come up with that "3.7 billion" number in the first place.
Of course at the rate they are going it won't be long before they claim that every single TCP session established with the defendant is an instance of possible copyright infringement, or theft, and that it would just be easier to calculate damages based upon some one's bandwidth
Re:It would be a good thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worrying actually (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets take the best case scenario and say this class action lawsuit ends up being 100% successful and destroys the RIAA. The record labels behind the organization will simply dissolve it, like a snake shedding old skin. The next day a new association will spring up, using new devious tactics for the next 10 years before they too are finally ousted, and so on. Until Sony, Universal, EMI and Warner are held accountable for the actions of the RIAA this won't change.
They've done it at least once already, "The Settlement Support Center was a less public part of the initiative. Its name may suggest a neutral organization set up to resolve disputes with evenhanded objectivity. In fact, it was financed by the record industry and operated like a cross between a call center and a debt collection firm. The SSC has since been dissolved."
Privacy lost (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It would be a good thing... (Score:3, Insightful)
We make that the assoication that they are the RIAA and suddenly the RIAA has no more value.
Re:It would be a good thing... (Score:2, Insightful)
Then again I guess that is consumers/citizens faults in the first place for not insisting that regulations are enforced unconditionally; and to ensure that those regulations are fair and in the interest of the people and the individual first and foremost.
Unfortunately the music industry comes across as one industry that has grown fat on not only screwing its own customers; but on screwing over many of its own artists to. And they has used some of the vast quantities of money that has passed through their accounts to "inform" (influence) political decisions, in relation to the music industry, for decades.
Q's and A's (Score:5, Insightful)
About time. The more "mainstream" pub on this whole debacle, the better. I think, if you were to lay out all the facts and history in front of the American people (well, those with brains, anyhoo), they would feel this way:
Is piracy wrong? Yes.
Does much P2P activity infringe on copyrights? Yes.
Do copyright holders have the right to defend and protect those copyrights? Yes.
Do the "yes" answers above justify bullying, intimidation, and harassment; spurious, questionable, and sometimes downright wrong technical claims; spying by 3rd parties; end runs around the legal system; or a general reluctance to allow accused file sharers to defend themselves, or take their case to a court of law? NO.
The last question is where the RIAA loses whatever moral high ground they may have.
Re:It would be a good thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's worrying actually (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It would be a good thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't just the media industry that has a choke hold on Congress. Yes, it is our fault but not for the reason you give. It is our fault because we give corporations, an immortal entity, the rights of a mortal man. Worse, because those corporations have no motivation beyond greed, they wield their power to feed that greed even to the detriment of real people.
For the specific case of copyright, it is the only business model on the face of the planet where employees (read: distributors+"Artists") are expecting to be paid decades or even centuries after they are finished the job. Where this idea that a person can make a one-hit-wonder and be paid perpetually for it is so wrong it is laughable. In no other industry do you find employees being paid beyond what they actually worked much less having that paycheck go to their heirs well after their death. Imagine if every business had to continue to pay all their employees+heirs for 90+ years after they quit. Business would come to a screeching halt then. But yet we are OK with it when it comes to copyright....Go figure.
Re:Interesting quote (Score:4, Insightful)
They count every download as a lost sale.
This is an obviously specious metric. Everyone has downloaded music for perusal, found out that it sucked ass, and deleted it. And pretty much everyone with bandwidth and friends without it has downloaded music for someone else and either deleted it or has it lying around, never listened to once. These are of course not necessarily lost sales, because these days you can go to a record store and listen before you buy.
The law takes the attitude that duplication and distribution are themselves illegal acts. However, if they do not result in a lost sale, who is being harmed? This is the basic problem with copyright law as it is today written.
I think it's pretty clear that if you can't demonstrate a simply provable loss of revenue, that no one has been significantly hurt. An argument that someone is giving away an endless supply of what you're selling and therefore harming your profits looks reasonable on its face, but if you are selling squid-flavored apple-rutabaga smoothies, then most of the people who get one are just going to pour them out anyway. THIS is what the music industry is upset about today. They want to control the previews of the music. With mp3 downloads people do not need to buy music without knowing if it's good or not, so they can't just make a SUPERSHIT album with one hot single and then sell it to you on that basis any more; practically no one listens to music in the store before they buy it unless it's in the little kiosk, although you can do this in many stores. This is also why the MPAA is so upset about bittorrent downloads. The Movie Theater experience is getting worse all the time and if you know the movie sucks, you aren't going to go see it.
The solution is to make movies and music that aren't shit, and sell them on their merit, but most of these guys wouldn't recognize talent if it ran a train on their ass, so that's pretty much a non-starter business model for the major labels.
Nothing legal about Extortion. (Score:4, Insightful)
The only thing legal about any of this is abuse of process. What you are looking at is mass produced fraud that should result in disbarment of everyone involved and jail time for the ring leaders. They knew what they were going to do to "dolphins" like Anderson with their "drift net" tactics. They also thought they were aiming for a less sympathetic but more pliable target when they targeted "rich" college kids. In all cases, the victims were stripped of their life savings if they caved in and of everything now and forever if they fought. The RIAA music sharing cases are one of the most degraded abuse of the legal system by the rich and powerful ever.
It's time for a backlash. The emails and reports behind this fraud should be ripped open to expose the guilty at the big music publishers.
Re:It's worrying actually (Score:1, Insightful)
There is actually an easy way to get rid of the RIAA and the "Big Four":
1. Seed the P2P networks with files containing random noise named as popular songs.
2. Get a large group of sharers, with easily associated IDs, to share these files.
3. Let the RIAA collect the IPs and song titles and try to sue thousands to millions of people (and lose)
4. Profit!
Re:You mean besides pension plans? (Score:3, Insightful)
Pensions are paid into as agreed upon by the employer and the employee with the lion's share being footed by the employee. All the while, corporations are playing financial games with those pensions declaring bankruptcy to get out of them.
And neither do McDonald's employees. What's your point?
Ad hominem (Score:2, Insightful)
Though you didn't imply that copyright law needs to change because the RIAA are asshats, the entire theme of this post did. So I would like to challenge that directly.
1) The RIAA claims that we need to strictly enforce copyright law (and charge per copy) in order to ensure that artists get paid and continue making music.
2) The RIAA are asshats.
Therefore: we don't need copyright law (and strict enforcement) in order to ensure that artists get paid and continue making music.
This is an example of the "ad hominem" [wikipedia.org] logical fallacy. Yes, they are asshats, but that has no bearing on the arguments they use to defend their business model.
I would summarize their position as a variant of the Hypothetical Syllogism [wikipedia.org] (I am adding more premises than allowed, for brevity).
1) If we do not have strict interpretation and enforcement of copyright law, then people will be able to get an artists work for free.
2) If people can get an artists work for free, then most people will.
3) If most people get an artists work for free, then artists will not be able to make enough money to sustain themselves.
4) If artists cannot make enough money to sustain themselves, then they will have no economic incentive to produce music.
5) If artists have no economic incentive to produce music, then they will not make music.
Therefore: in order for there to be music (which we obviously want), there must be strict enforcement of copyright law.
To the best of my knowledge, that is the line of reasoning being advocated, and it should therefore be logically attacked.
I would specifically (and individually) attack premises 3, 4, and 5. According to the US Department of Labor [bls.gov] most musicians work part time (already can't sustain themselves but work anyway) and also many of them earn money through live performances (monetizing their work even though free music is presently available). So my attacks, specifically, are:
3) Artists can still monetize their work, through live performances, merchandising, and alternative business models.
4) Even the lesser gains of part time employment or low-income alternative business models qualify as economic incentive.
5) Some artists produce music for the love of producing music, and think of compensation only after the fact.
So there you have it. In a nutshell I would say that we should at least experiment with the alternative business models, and see how they pan out. If all artists stop making music and America starts to experience cultural starvation, we can always reintroduce strict copyright enforcement later on...and then with much more universal support. As it stands, we are unwilling to even try, largely as a result of irrational argumentation (and, of course, a few wealthy/powerful entities who stand to benefit from our irrational behavior).
Re:It would be a good thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
I just returned from the bathroom. Should I send a check to whoever put the pipes in place ten years ago ?
Re:Let's Stand Up - A Call to Action (mildly O/T) (Score:3, Insightful)
It is also for the community to get involved in (1) establishing panels of expert witnesses to work for modest fees on the internet issues and hard drive forensics issues, and (2) major fundraising to assist in the legal defense of these folks.
Re:It would be a good thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It would be a good thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
-a creation with a perpetual life,
-whose primary function is to serve its shareholders' financial interests.
I.e, it is an immortal sociopath.
While consumer disinterest, etc., can have an effect, it is important in our society that the government -- which creates such 'immortals' -- regulate them quite carefully. To assume that market forces are alone sufficient to deter their excesses is just wrong.
If doing harm is profitable, corporations are programmed to do harm. They are programmed to do anything they can get away with. It is up to the government which created these extraordinary creatures to limit what they can get away with.
Regrettably, our courts have not yet shut down the RIAA's excesses, and our Congress -- far from shutting them down -- has shown itself to be quite deferential to the recording companies' wish to steal the internet from those who made it what it is.
Re:It would be a good thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
How the hell did this get modded insightful? You're comparing apples and oranges here and you should know it. To wit:
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.
The OP's right, you're wrong. In the case you specify you're paying the bank for 30 years for giving you a loan. You're paying back that loan + interest. And it's you that pays the builders -- from the money the bank loaned you. The bank's not being paid for your house for 30 years, they're being paid back their money they lent you. If you don't pay up they can take your house away from you, but you _own_ the house until that point. No one in this situation is getting paid more than once for the service they provide. The builders get paid once for building the house and the bank's getting paid once for letting you have a loan. The bank's just letting you spread your loan payments out over time so that you can afford to pay them back. (Oh and they'll earn more interest if you don't pay it off early so they're more than happy to let you take the full 30 years.)
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.
Actually your insurance company is providing you that service every month -- if you have an accident/etc. that qualifies as a claim on the policy. The rest of the time you're paying a fee to insure that they will cover you if something happens. Basically you're paying them to "insure" you can recover from catastrophic incidents. That others are paying into the pool as well is irrelevant, each of them is paying for the same service, they're not throwing money at nothing. As for lifetime payments being more than the policy limit, you can self-insure if you think that'll occur. Lots of companies do it, some people do as well. Most people aren't comfortable with self-insuring so they pay a company to insure them instead. The company's not getting paid for the same thing repeatedly, you're paying to make sure that they'll cover you each month in case something occurs. If you don't pay your premium for February and then have a wreck that month you'll find out that all that money you paid before doesn't help. That was because each payment was for the company to cover you for one period of time (be it 1 month, 3 months, 6 months or a year). And I don't know about you but my car insurance policy number actually changes every 6 months to reflect that it is indeed a new policy.
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).
In this case the store gets paid exactly once for the big-ticket item and you pay exactly once for it. You're paying the credit card company for giving you credit. The interest charged beyond the actual purchase price is their fee for letting you spread that big-ticket item's purchase out over time. Again, no one is getting paid more than once here. You pay interest to the credit card company until you've paid the balance off, then you don't. (Unless you charge more stuff to it, which is what they're counting on.)
When you buy into a co-op or timeshare, you're paying for something that was probably paid off years ago and is