Will the New RIAA Tactic Boost P2P File Sharing? 309
newtley writes "The RIAA's claim that it'll stop suing people may have serious consequences... for the RIAA. When it dropped its attack on seven University of Michigan students, Recording Industry vs. The People wondered if the move was linked to three investigations, with MediaSentry as the target, before Michigan's Department of Labor and Economic Growth. Now, 'LSA sophomore Erin Breisacher said she stopped downloading music illegally after hearing about the possibility of receiving a lawsuit, but now that the RIAA has stopped pursuing lawsuits she "might start downloading again,"' says the Michigan Daily, going on to quote LSA senior Chad Nihranz as saying, 'I figure, if there aren't as many lawsuits they will come out with more software to allow students to download more.'"
What about some of the other potential tactics we've discussed recently, such as the UK's proposed £20 per year film and music tax or the $5 monthly fee suggested in the US? Is there anything the RIAA can do to reduce illegal file-sharing without generating massive amounts of bad publicity?
Is there anything...... (Score:1, Interesting)
Is there anything the RIAA can do to reduce illegal file-sharing without generating massive amounts of bad publicity?
Yes. Sell songs in an open and non-DRM-encumbered format for a fair price. Then accept that when someone buys a song they can listen to it on their PC AND their i(river/pod/whatever). Stop trying to sue people for tens of thousands of dollars for "stealing" a $.99 song.
Is there anything the RIAA can do? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, I firmly believe there isn't. They chose the wrong strategy, and got caught out in the cold. They lead lives that are so different from ours, they've become convinced by their own arguments, just like the Wall Street bankers and their bonuses. The RIAA really doesn't have much of a choice but to throw in the towel and start off in a different direction. Of course, they won't, and I'll be one of those cheering their burial.
They've made it this far because a large part of their argument comes from the idea that file-sharing is globally illegal. This type of file sharing has to be made firmly, clearly, and once-and-for-all clearly legal. Somewhere, we have to ask ourselves what value do recorded music, video, and programs have? If we're not happy with the free-market answer, we have to find it in ourselves to come up with a solution that modifies the free-market such that we support these activities. Simply declaring the free-market illegal is not a valid strategy. It hasn't ever worked in the past-- witness alcohol, drugs, etc...-- and it's not working now.
Now, I for one think that the arts are far more worthy than the sciences. As an engineer, I was offered a salary 5 times what a friend was making, even though I was going to do numerical analysis of toilet paper (no shit, pun intended) and she was working 80 hour days with children's theater. If the fact that we live in a society that values toilet paper more than theater offends you, then you need to make the decisions in your life that reflect this.
Science is an awesome hobby, and it's what I do for a living, but somewhere we're seriously out of whack when business is worth more than life. The RIAA mentality shows this, and there's really nothing they can do except fight until they've carved out a sufficiently well protected niche that they can survive in some minimal fashion. To take an analogy from Go, they're trying desperately to make two eyes, even though the game is practically over.
My two cents (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there anything the RIAA can do to stop copyright infringement without looking like a bunch of asses? Sure, but they've now in a deep hole dug on the unsustainable premise that they could either sue all infringers out of existence or at least enough of them to cow everyone else into staying off P2P. Turns out that wasn't working either.
Here are my proposals for ways they can get turned around:
1. Do their damnedest to promote all the usable online services. iTunes, Amazon, the whole smash. No DRM anywhere, though I think people won't mind fingerprinting. Do a mix of buy-to-own and subscription services; there are separate markets for each. Sell audio with lossless encoding (Apple Lossless and FLAC if that works in the non-Apple ecosystem). Raffle off concert tickets for buyers on the download services. Try to reach everyone -- Windows, Mac, Linux.
2. Do a "legal" P2P service that traffics purely in 128kbps MP3s of popular songs with lead-in or lead-out ads. "Weezer's Red Album -- now available from your online music store." That kind of thing.
3. Let Web radio live. I'm sure there's a reasonable profit stream there that everyone can tap into if nobody strangles the golden goose, so to speak. It also drives sales -- when I was a kid the only music I actually bought was stuff I'd already heard on the radio. Get people to actually use the "radio" function in iTunes and web browsers and whatnot. Music radio on 3G phones. The possibilities are endless here.
4. Instead of chasing homemade music videos off YouTube, get people to pay a "licensing fee" of say $5 and then let them be. There are also cross-licensing deals for advertising dollars to be had with the video services.
5. ENOUGH WITH THE MEDIA TAXES. If I pay a "tax" on recording media or my iPod's hard drive or whatever I will download everything I can for free. I'm going to assume I'm already "paid up" because guess what, I am. Besides, if we pay a media tax the music industry should be quasi-nationalized.
6. (the one they'll never accept) Deal with the fact that music is now a more distributed phenomenon and that the massive profit margins the record companies saw on audio cassettes and CDs just can't exist anymore. Make what profit you can instead of getting sucked down the toilet with the rest of the economy.
I will bet good money, though, that the RIAA won't do any one of these things over the next five years-- instead they'll just chase the phantom of infringement that they'll never be able to stop, music sales will go completely down the drain, and the world music industry will restructure around the online services being labels themselves. Cut your song in a recording studio then upload it to Amazon and iTunes. They take 35%, you take the rest. Hell, the RIAA should be very very scared of this happening, and I expect they are, but they're going to make it happen and maybe that's a good thing for all us music buyers.
Re:The fee is the ultimate goal (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree with this. Most independent artists aren't affiliated with RIAA-represented labels. That's a lot of what makes them "independent". If the RIAA is doing the collecting, why would they pay out to labels that don't want to work with them?
How can the reduce it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Lower prices.
It's simple economics. Lower prices will result in higher marginal utility and more people will buy instead of download.
Look at it this way. If all of the millions of songs that people are downloading for free were to go away, not every one of those people would go out and buy the music. If the prices were reduced to, say, (allofmp3.com levels) then many people who wouldn't otherwise buy the songs would.
LK
Re:Sounds like a good deal (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
But of course! (Score:3, Interesting)
How to increase sales and decrease downloads? Easy.
1. Make stuff I want to buy.
Granted, that does not reduce P2P useage, because I don't download either what I don't want, and I tend to think many think likewise. Make good music/movies that I want to see/hear and I'll buy them!
2. Get rid of DRM and other nuisances
I still do not buy a good movie if I have to fear the installation of a rootkit, or that it doesn't work in my PC at all (which happens to be my media machine, why'd I buy a dedicated DVD player?). I do not buy the movie if it forces me to sit through ads for movies I neither want nor care for. This is, if anything, the main reason for people to go to P2P instead of buying movies (besides the monetary reason). I don't mind the 20ish bucks for a good movie, but I do mind the hassle I have to worry about.
3. Give additional benefits
Downloaded content can only carry the content itself. Give people something besides the things they get on their disc. Artbooks can have a value of their own, and they can't be reproduced easily. Start hyping the "collectible value" of CDs, maybe design the covers of CDs from an artist so that they all together form nice pictures that would look cool on the collector's CD rack. But for that, you might have to return to artists that crank out more than one or two CDs before you dump them, I know. Another idea would be some sort of "limited edition" versions of CDs, create batches of about 10.000 with different artwork. Some people might buy the same CDs over and over because they gotta have them all. People are hunter and gatherers at heart, exploit that!
4. Create other media and offer discounts
Movies beg for a making of and maybe a published script. Add coupons for this and other media you want to sell that offer discounts on those additional things. People will consider it a bargain and buy them, too.
Re:The answer to reducing illegal file-sharing (Score:3, Interesting)
because people are illegally downloading music they don't like?
No. They are downloading music they do not like enough to pay for it.
Maybe they find the cost prohibitive. Maybe they download stuff they only listen to once or twice.
My girlfriend has enough MP3s to last her a whole month of non-stop playing, if not more. I'm not all that sure she's ever listened to it all.
It is easy to hoard stuff, especially in digital format, since it does not occupy additional physical space.
Besides, as argued in Baen Library, it's just free marketing. If the cost is reasonable, people will buy the books, the music and the movies they like. As soon as you start treating them as people, not as thieves. The MAFIAA come off as greedy bastards, and fairness is an instinct in all great apes. That's why nobody likes them very much, and why people will not stop pirating stuff.
Instead of forcing people to pay, make them want to give you money. You do catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Unless they are fruit flies.
I stopped buying CDs because of the RIAA (Score:3, Interesting)
I stopped buying CDs when they started producing more and more CDs that were actually "music discs" and not CDs. I found that I could no longer rip them as easily and eventually just gave up. I like having my music in ogg, which no music store has, so I gave up on the idea of downloading legally. And I don't want to be the target of a lawsuit, so I refuse to download illegally. As a result, my music collection is getting kind of stale and the music industry is missing out on the 20-30 CDs a year I used to buy.
It seems that every step they take to reduce piracy just makes it that more unlikely that I'll buy legitimately from them. They make CDs rip-proof and I won't buy CDs. They make online music stores use DRM and I won't buy MP3s (or more technically WMAs or AACs).
I can't speak for every individual obviously, but if they were to just totally stop all of their anti-piracy initiatives, I'd be buying $300-$400 more music each year. There is definitely a cost to trying to stop piracy.
Re:Sounds like a good deal (Score:3, Interesting)
And who decides which music is should receive funds, and which shouldn't? Music, unlike science, is highly subjective, and there are no wrong or useless projects.
Re:Sounds like a good deal (Score:3, Interesting)
This happens, actually, at universities.
I, a student, volunteer to sing in a choir. A professor gets paid in part because he conducts this choir, and part of his job is to put on good concerts -- if he doesn't, he gets fired.
These concerts are free to the public, are recorded and broadcast, and provide high-quality music at a low cost.
The system works pretty well if you like the sort of music that universities consider of academic interest: classical, jazz, ethnic, electronic, and so on. If you're after metal, well, not many universities have an Institute of Gratuitous-Umlaut Studies.
Fortunately, the styles of music that university music programs promote are exactly those that it's hard to get mainstream label support for (because 16-year-olds typically don't like them), so everyone's covered.
Re:Is there anything the RIAA can do... (Score:5, Interesting)
Until recently, most music in iTunes was DRM-encumbered, which more than likely turned a good number of people off from the service, especially if you didn't own an iPod. I'm not sure whether or not iTunes works in Linux either, but the Windows version may be working through Wine. That's probably enough to turn most /. readers away.
eMusic doesn't have the problems that iTunes has/had, but I don't think it has anywhere near the selection that's available on iTunes, at least if you like more mainstream types of music.
Of course people have the option of going to the Amazon music store. MP3 downloads that will work on any player and no DRM. I've never used the service so I can't speak to how easy it is to use, but a quick check of the website suggests that the price tends to be a bit more reasonable than iTunes (there's a list of 'popular' songs that are selling for $.79) which is kind of nice.
Why people are still 'pirating' / 'stealing' music is beyond me. I suppose I don't mind it if people want to try before they buy, but both songs and albums are cheaper than they've been in over a decade. Maybe a good chunk of piracy is people who're just trying something out. The numbers only reflect downloads, not how many people downloaded it and then either deleted it or went on to purchase a legitimate copy.
I suppose the best way to prevent the piracy that the RIAA likes to complain about is to create a music store where music is sold at a reasonable price without DRM in a high quality format that works for almost everyone. They can completely remove the try before you buy folks from the equation by offering a DRM-encumbered version of the album that you can download free of charge and listen to as many times as you like for a limited number of days. If you like the album you can purchase it and the DRM disappears forever.
The only people who'll still bother with torrent sites are for the most part those people who never intended to purchase the music anyway. They can be left alone or litigated to hell for all I care.
Of course this makes entirely too much sense and the odds that we'll see it before the dinosaurs running the RIAA are completely incapable of thinking in modern terms. They're trying to hold on to a business model that doesn't make sense in today's world and are completely destroying their business while doing it.
If they wanted to remain in business and remain profitable they would open up a worldwide store similar to the one I outlined above. No more waiting for an album to be released months later in another part of the world and no more having to resort to downloading an album simply because it's not available in your country. Why this hasn't been done already is completely beyond me.
8 years of MAFIAA mentioned in Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
The MAFIAA come off as greedy bastards, and fairness is an instinct in all great apes.
It's amazing. I'm reading past articles in Slashdot, and we were already talking about RIAA and MPAA since 8 years ago.
From an article on Sep 11, 2001 [slashdot.org]:
I felt a mix of emotions: disappointed that I wouldn't have the chance to testify and lock horns with the MPAA and other industry lobbyists, and guilty for having such self-centered thoughts during this crisis.
The earliest article I've personally found is the article MPAA vs. 2600 [slashdot.org] dated May 2001.
Re:8 years of MAFIAA mentioned in Slashdot (Score:2, Interesting)
So the MAFIAA got going in May 2001. By September there were USPTO hearings planned and lots of people were getting ready to testify against them.
And then 9/11 happened?
Re:Is there anything the RIAA can do... (Score:3, Interesting)
I use both iTunes and Emusic. Neither are painful.
My car stereo plays mp3s. But not acc... I can convert, kinda, in this big bloated app that trys to install a browser if I don't watch for it. (In Windows)
Non apple music players... Nuff said.
I do run linux...
But the best one is I like older music. I can find all the obscure 90s techno on TPB, and not much on iTunes. I can get it in a big chunk, and it will work in ALL my players. It will never expire.
Notice how none of these advantages mention price...
But it is getting better. If you use a selection of legal sources, and have the tools to convert media formats, and you are allowed to by the license that no body reads or is likely to understand, you can almost get close to what the pirates have had for years.
Re:Sounds like a good deal (Score:4, Interesting)
Never mind that if the music industry actually managed to make this happen, they could essentially STOP making music
There are some that say this has already happened.
Re:Is there anything the RIAA can do? (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem is human nature.
People love to cheat, steal, and murder. It's only because of police that it doesn't happen rampantly, but in cyberspace where you can get away with it, it is very common. When the cat is away, the mice will play.
The RIAA is fighting against a buch of asshole pirates that really don't give a damn about copyright (never will either). The problem is that the RIAA is mistargeting innocent bystanders and bringing down a flood of wrath from the people who actually WOULD have scruples, thus causing people to pirate out of spite. If the RIAA had perfect aim and only took out pirates that it could prove were pirates, they'd have a lot more sympathy.
The RIAA needs to yield to the lawlessness of cyberspace, tighten up its litigation and go after real pirates without being complete clusterfucks with the evidence, and start hitting targets that count. I.e., real pirates.
Piracy is wrong, but so is how the RIAA goes about doing things.
Re:Sounds like a good deal (Score:4, Interesting)
Is the content itself without value? If so, you are correct in saying there is "NO product". I think about some of my favorite TV shows -- like Firefly -- I think I read it cost $1,000,000 per episode to make. Yeah it got canceled, but with a way to make money, the show would not have been made. Compare the satisfaction of watching a great sci-fi with a slideshow of cat pictures on youtube. The first takes real money to make, and won't be made without a way to recoup those expenses. The second costs virtually nothing, but gets boring after mere minutes.
It's a real issue for media producers -- how to make something better than cat slideshows when people won't pay for the media.
Re:Longer answer (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's a few options:
- Start treating the indies and non-"top 40 list" artists with respect.
I see this a lot but I don't know what "more respect" is supposed to mean. Sure I'd like to see more new music but haven't all great bands eventually had to scrape up from nothing?
- Start making the production value of CD's worthwhile again. This means put in proper cover art, lyric sheets, etc rather than just a tiny scrap of paper.
This means they will cost more, unfortunately. And if you don't want to spend the money on a CD then why would you start buying if it cost more, even with the new stuff? I actually don't mind the loss of cool liner art. I find myself buying music from new artists if they allow me to pay online and download their stuff, I'm not really looking for a physical disc and if I ever need one I can just burn one.
Re:lala.com (Score:1, Interesting)
If there were a way to return crappy music I'd feel better about paying for it, but they assume if you open the package all you did was copy it and try to get it for free. If they want to assume I'm a pirate I have to play their game, and it ends up hurting them.
Note that at lala.com you can play just about anything once for free. I consider that a big step in the right direction. Too bad they sued a bunch of other companies that would have done this years ago out of business...
Its all smoke and mirrors (Score:3, Interesting)
I was watching an Australian late night music show (Rage - ABC) the other night and they had an interesting clip of a spokesman from the MAFIAA lamenting about the deluge of pirated music, while standing in front of supposedly 100s and 100s of copies, that was hitting the country from Asia and that, unless things changed, the music industry would be DEAD in a couple of years.
He then went on to wax lyrical about the quality of the copies and getting no value for money etc etc.
The laughable thing about this is that the clip was from the mid 1970'S and he was holding cassette tapes !!
Over 30 years ago, the music industry was facing the same death and mayhem from pirated music that they face today, and yet, they didn't die. Didn't go broke. Didn't get pirated out of existence. In fact - most of them thrived!
I'm not saying they don't have a legitimate issue, but for decades now, they've seriously overstated the threat.
Re:I don't pirate anything (Score:3, Interesting)
Honestly, I don't know one single person who doesn't have an illegitimate copy of something.
An unlicensed Windows install on an old piece of crap Pentium II in the closet. An old bootleg cassette from a friend. A bad VHS copy of a movie. Everyone has pirated something at some point.
Don't try to sound so righteous. You've done it and you know it.
Re:I don't pirate anything (Score:3, Interesting)
Honestly, I don't know one single person who doesn't have an illegitimate copy of something.
Try to find a movie or music that was not embedded in a webpage on my computer. I have several cds and tapes I legally bought or was given as a gift that I have not listened to in years. If I were to play music, I'd rather be the one playing it myself, I have a flute I want to learn to play, or I'd play a vinyl record on a turntable or on a reel-to-reel tape deck [wikipedia.org]. On the other hand I have hundred of DVDs and tapes of movies I legally bought or was given as gifts I do watch, on TV not my computer. Not one disk has been put into the DVD/CD drive in my computer.
An unlicensed Windows install on an old piece of crap Pentium II in the closet. An old bootleg cassette from a friend. A bad VHS copy of a movie. Everyone has pirated something at some point.
That's awful arrogant to say everyone has pirated something.
Falcon
Re:They already do this (Score:4, Interesting)
This is basically turning into just another useless TV Licence entitlement. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, the TV Licence idea started out in many European countries as a way to support their first national television/radio broadcasting network.
What happened over time however is that as the technology improved and became cheaper, the original 100% marketshare that the original organization enjoyed -- dwindled down to 2 or 3% of their respective market. And yet, that original subsidy -- that original TV Licence, which only increased over time and which can go as high as $200 per year in some countries, is *still* only used to subsidize that 2 or 3% of the current content producers (and some would argue, that even that estimate is too high).
Basically, this is also what's going to happen with that blank media tax. Right now, it's going to the RIAA. Some would argue that independents are not going to receive a penny of that (and I would sort of agree with that), but saying this is actually completely missing the point. Five to twenty years from now, some of us are going to become parents/grandparents, we'll be using those blank medias for music (may be), but we'll also be using those blank media disks for recording thousands of hours of baby videos, closed-circuit security footage of our home, and other miscellaneous home videos. And any amount of professionally produced content will actually be dwarfed by the sheer amount of user-generated personal crap that we'll be recording on those. At least, that's the trend I'm starting to see developing right now. So if we keep on subsidizing the RIAA with proceeds from blank media sales (or any other type of storage medium), we're creating an entitlement monster that we'll probably never be able to get rid of.
Start making the production value of CD's (Score:3, Interesting)
worthwhile again. This means put in proper cover art, lyric sheets, etc rather than just a tiny scrap of paper.
I'd substitute vinyl records for CDs. Here'a an interesting article from "Wired", "Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD's Coffin [wired.com]". Best Buy and Costco [latimes.com] are starting to sell vinyl.
Sign some fucking new artists for god's sakes.
There are at least 4 shops within a couple of miles of me that sell vinyl. At one someone told me vinyl was popular with local artists.
There's also one thing I'd love to see happen from the government's end, which would be to reinstate the radio station ownership rules. It used to be, there were over 5000 different radio companies in the US. Now, 98% of the US market is owned by only 5 companies;
Which rules are you talking about? The rules I'll support are those used before the FRC, Federal Radio Commission [wikipedia.org], which was the predecessor to the FCC. Back then radiowaves were homesteaded. The first person to use a radio frequency was allowed to use that frequency in that area. If someone came along after and started broadcasting and it interfered with the first broadcaster the second station had to move to another frequency or stop broadcasting. And the courts [mises.org] were applying the common law theory of property rights to this. It was after Radio Act of 1927 which created the FRC that airwaves were licensed [wikipedia.org].
Falcon
Re:Longer answer (Score:2, Interesting)
I asked him 'but what about called-in requests? if someone calls you on sunday, wouldn't they want to hear the request that day?' he responded with 'well, people are happy enough hearing themselves on the radio, so we just put them on at other times and they never complain.'
isn't that awesome? made me not want to work in the radio business [I was working at a college station at the time, about to graduate].