After having his case dismissed, Rolando Amurao countersued for a declaration of non-infringement and a finding of copyright misuse. He claimed that they acted as a private investigator without the proper license. Amurao was not alone in his concerns. MediaSentry, the investigators relied upon most frequently in these cases, is also facing investigation by various governmental entities. On February 28, , the RIAA announced a new "deterrence and education initiative" targeting college students nationwide.
At the website, those receiving pre-litigation letters can simply settle their cases by paying the settlement with a credit card, without any aspect of the case ever entering the legal system. This in turn saves the recording industry the substantial costs of actually having to file and pursue a "John Doe" suit.
At the same time, the costs saved by the RIAA in not filing an actual suit can then be applied towards targeting more students with pre-litigation letters.
The RIAA has put special effort into getting universities to deliver these pre-litigation letters. However, university responses to this effort have been varied, ranging from complete refusal to forward pre-litigation letters to students, to fining students upon receipt.
Since the letters are sent under threat of legal action, but before any lawsuit commences, the colleges themselves are under no legal obligation to forward these letters to students who have been targeted. The University of Wisconsin, the University of Maine and the University of Kansas, for example, have refused to forward the pre-litigation letters, citing a refusal to be the RIAA's "legal agent.
Stanford University in California has taken the opposite tack. Not only do they forward on such letters, but starting in September , the university began charging students for complaints they receive from the RIAA.
Some students targeted by the RIAA have gone to court, with mixed success. Meanwhile, not content with using the judicial process, the RIAA has used its lobbying power to put intense pressure on universities to use filtering and other technologies to stop P2P file-sharing.
In May , members of Congress from both parties on the House Judiciary and the Education and Labor Committees sent a letter to 20 universities requesting that they respond to an extensive survey asking about their policies regarding network file sharing.
One year later, after months of intensive wrangling, Congress passed the Higher Education Act HEA , which included a provision requiring campuses to develop "plans to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including through the use of a variety of technology-based deterrents.
Are the lawsuits working? Has the arbitrary singling out of nearly 30, random American families helped promote public respect for copyright law? Have the lawsuits put the P2P genie back in the bottle or restored the record industry to its revenues?
For example, at the end of , a group of independent computer scientists at UC San Diego and UC Riverside published a study aimed at measuring P2P usage from through Drawing on empirical data collected from two Tier 1 ISPs, the researchers concluded:.
In general we observe that P2P activity has not diminished. On the contrary, P2P traffic represents a significant amount of Internet traffic and is likely to continue to grow in the future, RIAA behavior notwithstanding. The methodology employed by the researchers had several advantages over the survey-based approaches that had been used in earlier studies.
The empirical data eliminated the self-reporting bias that is an inevitable part of surveys, a bias that was almost certainly exacerbated by the high-profile lawsuit campaign. In addition, by measuring traffic at the link level, the study was able to track file sharing that may not show up otherwise due to the use of alternate ports. Big Champagne, for example, monitors the peak number of U. Its numbers are accurate enough to be used by major record labels, Billboard, Entertainment Weekly, and Clear Channel to monitor the popularity of various artists on those networks.
Data from BayTSP, which monitors P2P file sharing networks in order to provide copyright enforcement services to major motion picture studios and record labels, also indicate that P2P file sharing continued to grow despite the RIAA lawsuit campaign.
The growth in P2P popularity continued in and Big Champagne reports that the average number of simultaneous users on P2P networks swelled to 9. Other data suggests that consumers now consider P2P file-sharing applications to be a necessity on their PCs. A few early surveys of Internet users contradicted these numbers. For example, in November and December , researchers at the Pew Internet and American Life Project called 1, Internet users across the nation to ask them whether they continued to download music.
Many pointed out, however, that this dramatic shift might have been caused by an increased reluctance to admit downloading in light of the widely publicized RIAA lawsuits.
In other words, the widespread publicity attending the RIAA lawsuits may have encouraged the respondents to be more willing to lie about their downloading activities. While it is hard to precisely measure the use of P2P and the amount of illegal file sharing in the U.
The lawsuit campaign has not succeeded in driving P2P out of the mainstream, much less to the fringes, of the digital music marketplace. Moreover, by most accounts P2P usage is growing rapidly in the rest of the world, where the RIAA has not been able to replicate the scale of its lawsuits against Americans of all ages and backgrounds.
In fact, there are signs that even the record companies that have contributed millions to anti-piracy trade groups are growing disenchanted with the ineffectiveness and bad press their efforts have brought. While the RIAA's assault on P2P goes on, a substantial amount of illegal music copying occurs beyond the realm of P2P networks altogether, leaving the recording industry with little recourse. The "educational" value of the litigation campaign is also diminishing because it has become "business as usual.
If the goal of the RIAA was to increase awareness of the copyright laws, that mission has been accomplished, albeit at the expense of financial hardship to nearly 30, arbitrarily chosen individuals. But as press attention fades, the "bang for the buck" provided by suing randomly-chosen filesharers has diminished as well.
Grokster decision as "the dawn of a new day—an opportunity that will bring the entertainment and technology communities even closer together, with music fans reaping the rewards.
Certainly, some music fans are finding what they want at the authorized music services and download stores. But the volume of downloads sold to date continues to pale when compared to the number of files swapped over P2P networks.
Developments in and suggest that the record industry is finally beginning to focus more on the "carrot" by making authorized music services more attractive, rather than relying solely on the "stick" of lawsuits. For example, all the major labels have finally released part or all of their catalogs in DRM-free format. These initiatives hold more promise for luring music fans away from P2P filesharing than the lawsuit campaign.
In response to the RIAA lawsuits, many filesharers are also beginning to opt for new file sharing technologies that protect their anonymity. Internet-based file sharing, moreover, may soon be supplanted by hand-to-hand file sharing.
As noted, burning and exchanging CDs among friends is commonplace. USB flashdrives, which now offer for a few dollars as much capacity as the first-generation iPod did in , have also become popular, providing another convenient means for quickly sharing files. It has failed to curtail P2P downloading. It has not persuaded music fans that sharing is equivalent to shoplifting.
It has not put a penny into the pockets of artists. It has done little to drive most filesharers into the arms of authorized music services. This failure should not come as a surprise. Now stop your scare mongering because no one is buying it. It won't be the end of the world and no one believes it will be no matter how much you proclaim it.
Worth noting that the labels only arrived in the 20th century. Music is far older than that. Before, music was distributed directly to the people, and then spread by the people. The record labels came in because they could distribute music faster and cheaper than anyone else. And now? Now the average Joe can distribute faster and cheaper. The only thing the major records can do better is initial investment costs and marketing This gives them no room to "Drop the DVDs, charge more for theater viewings, and stay out of the marketplace.
Since they often tie movies to games, they don't get to stray too far from their current market structure. The stock holders must be fed! Hollywood is already crumbling as the industry adjusts to excessive costs of filming in California. More and more movies are being made in other states for the simple fact that it is cheaper! My point about the movie industry vs the music industry was that the movie industry adjusted to the price demands of the market, while the music industry did not.
The current problem of the movie industry is that it blinked when when the music moguls balked. Had they followed the pathway I laid out, Itunes would never have come into existance. Apple was only able to bring Itunes to market because the music industry was too stupid to do it themselves. That, also, paved the way for the dominace of the Ipod. The DRM on Itunes shows that they could have held on to a larger share of the market as the market shifted.
Had the music industry shown this sort of agility, they could have continued to be central marketing repositories for the music market. Value added products like videos, posters and tickets tied to the "Album" concept could have continued to perpetuate their base market structure.
Yes, they would still run into some of the competition and free trading that continues today, but greatly diminshed. They would have still had two things working in their favor. First, they would not have pissed off their customers as they have.
That relative good will would have still given them a continued growing market share. As it has been pointed out elsewhere, CD sales were still rising, even as Napster trading grew. Secondly, the perception of the music industry would have changed little in the face of that relative good will and left them in the position to still be the ones most likely to be able to promte the next U2, Tool or whomever.
They could have garnered even greater freewill with price reductions. Such price reductions in the face of reduced distribution costs would have spurred greater sales and they would have made even more money off of simple volume increases.
The grand majority of the populace is far too lazy to learn how to make such conversions and distribute them. Nor do they do it now with the music they purchase and download from Itunes. Most of the mp3s out there now come from CD rips. Few people burn their Itunes purchases to CD just so they came rip it to mp3, let alone flac which takes up about 10 times the space.
Furthermore, the movie industry doesn't really face the same problem that the music industry does. It just thinks it does. As you pointed out a movie is only likely to see use a few times, regardless of whether it is a DVD or a download. Even with the increased size of hard drives and a reduction of file size by, say Divx. Why would you keep around anything more than your favorite movies when they can easily be found online or VOD.
Your music collection, however, must be allowed to take the bulk of the space for two reasons. Hunting down music to listen to is far more tedious than hunting down a movie, in particular as the music market disperses into a growing number of smaller companies and bands attending to production and distribution themselves. You have to stop and watch a movie. Music can be consumed while accomplishing any number of tasks, any time of the day or night.
Few can sit around and watch movies and still keep their job while music is often encouraged in the work place. They are called record labels, and any band signed to a major label has plenty of music, easy to find, no problem there.
You are confusing laziness with the inability of non-label bands to get their product out there widely distributed and promoted. They might be on 10 mp3 sites, but since most of them such and it's hard to search, you could spend hours looking for them.
Then you go to their "official site", which hasn't been updated in 8 months, which points to links on an mp3 site that doesn't run anymore. Why no update? The band is too busy on the road selling t-shirts to worry about a website and music links. You just indicated the difference between what is what will be. Good luck with the future, you just described it perfectly. It is laziness on entities like the RIAA who don't even provide a list on their website of which artists are signed and which ones aren't.
They're lazy, they want everything the easy way. Or, you can buy music from the RIAA, it's a free market. And others can get or buy music from this specific artist who hasn't updated his website in 8 months or go to another artist that is not associated with the RIAA or they can buy music owned by the RIAA.
So what's the problem? Tough, it's a free market and any attempts by the RIAA to have the government distort that free market will only make people hate them more. Two points here: 1-It was the laziness of the music industry that they missed their opportunity to keep that market.
A moment of silence here for Leather and Charlie Blue I'm a couple of decades behind these folks, but Leather worked at laying carpet during the day as well as writing a new song every day. Maintained a couple of sites for his music and I saw him last about two years back and first thing in the morning when we got up he said "Hey let me play you a song" and picked up his guitar. The laziness belongs to belongs to the music industry moguls, not the artists!
Sorry about the confusion, my reference here about laziness Most people learn of new artists through friends real or virtual not by spending hours hunting out new artists.
As for this silly quote: "You just indicated the difference between what is what will be. We're just too lazy to do so. These are the folks picking up where the old music industry left off. The old music industry are the only ones who need the RIAA!
Long live the the Independant Artist! It's time to throw on the headphones and crank it up. I think I'll start with Leather's "Break the Law".
This should not be about what people are willing to pay, it should be about what's a fair price. Retail movies was a big enough business, but not huge. Video tapes were good sellers, but the industry didn't hit it's stride until DVDs came along. They were also more expensive to produce initially, and required stores to double stock, tapes and DVDs, for quite a long time. The initial price for the DVD was set basically at "what they are paying now, plus a quality premium".
Was it right or wrong? In the interim, buying movies to own has become a big business. It is a volume business, unlike what it use to be. When you get volume, you get economies of scale, you get lower margins required, etc. In effect, the price of a DVD today is lower than a price of a tape then, with the higher quality.
However, and this is key - if the market for DVDs drops because of piracy, it is likely that some or all of those economies of scale would be lost. The business is profitable now because of it's scale. As Mike would say, it's Econ The price of movies dropped because the price of production dropped, not because movies are valued any less than music as the statement "How many times do you watch a DVD movie?
Well, the price of producing music dropped to, now Joe Blow can make music on his computer and distribute it. The price of distributing music has also dropped. So yeah, the price of music dropped and it should come as no surprise that the RIAA would lose profits now that they must compete in a free market.
Of course trying to ask for government regulation that gives them an advantage will only make people hate them more. No, it is both. You are assuming that production is the only cost - that isn't true. The costs of production and distribution have some down with volume, but the market itself also doesn't support a higher price.
However, as internet speeds continue to grow, it is very likely that movies will suffer the same fate as music, eaten up by file sharing.
At some point, the movie business will go through what the music business has been going through. I am suspecting that DVDs will dry up pretty fast, or be sold at a much higher price in "limited edition box sets" or similar to justify a significanly higher price and lower sales volumes. There are other alternatives, but it isn't clear that the public would be accepting of any sort of DRM.
Anonymous Coward , 16 Aug pm. Lets see how much people like you when you adopt that business model. To the extent that price has gone down because costs have gone down, the same thing can be said about music.
Now anyone can produce music and distribute it and so we should expect prices to go down. Yes, competition means the RIAA makes less money, but tough, stop crying to the government about it. No one owes you an unlevel playing field. Movies have always been widely distributed. Yes, as Internet speeds increase and more sophisticated video editing software becomes cheaper and easier to use more Joe Blows will make their own higher quality movies and T.
Tough, that's a free market, crying to the government for an unlevel playing field will only make people hate you. Look at Michael Moor and Sicko and the documentaries he makes, we have more and more Joe Blows creating content that people want.
Yes, this is bad for the MPAA which has practically had a monopoly on this stuff, much of which was probably through government regulation though our mainstream media probably kept us in the dark about most of that. BTW, if people don't stand up against forces that want to limit and higher the price to our freedom of speech over the Internet those freedoms will be taken away from us.
The airwaves used to be much like the Internet years ago but evil conglomerate forces eventually managed to control the distribution of information. Don't assume it can't happen to the Internet, it happened to airwaves and the same forces are working to take away our freedoms over the Internet. If they do go out of business, once again, it won't be the end of the world. If there is a market need for movies the free market will meet the need to the extent that it is needed.
Keep government out. It also depends on what we consider to encompass production within the context of what I was saying. There are two basic costs, production includes editing or whatever and distribution which includes costs of theaters. Well, I suppose there is another important but needless cost I left out, lobbying. I am not making any claims on the validity of those assumptions, if you disagree with his assumptions then why not challenge his assumptions instead of my response?
More sophisticated video editing software that's easier for Joe Blow to use is getting cheaper and the only reason bandwidth isn't getting cheaper in America but it is in other countries is because the government is being manipulated by evil special interest groups to grant them monopolies over the infrastructure. The movie industry must compete with Joe Blow who can make a movie just as easily with his friends and put it on Youtube and if the MPAA tries to do anything to stop this they will, like the RIAA, turn more and more people against them.
The Idiot , 16 Aug am. Simple: because they failed to adapt to the changes in the publishing and promotion of music. When the Internet became a commodity, the big labels could all have embraced it and used it to further their interests. Instead, they failed and sued every model that worked. You are the idiot, that is true. The "business models that worked" only worked because they weren't paying for product. Easy as hell to run a store when you don't pay for inventory.
Hard as hell to compete against someone who isn't paying for inventory. Idiot indeed. I will celebrate that day, and mark my words -- it is coming. It won't be the end of the music business, it will be the end of the dinosaur that is killing the music business.
Instead, I purchase from artists who are not connected with them. And purchase, I do! I will never buy from a RIAA member label again, ever. Are you forgetting that it was technology that enabled the Recording Companies existence at all in the first place, and it is again technology that will make their existence irrelevant.
Before there was a recording technology - no Recording Companies, after commoditizing recording technology - no Recording Companies. Ironic eh? But the dinosaurs will be extinct. Why not embrace new marketting methodes that the RIAA is trying tp sue out of existance?
Oh, right, because sueing is easier and you get money out of it. No, again, because nobody has put anything "changed" on the table that is a true business model. Otherwise, it's just a give away. Even the Radiohead "name your price" thing that everyone seems to think was a great success in the end really wasn't all that good. Why not? They also "admitted more people downloaded the album for free than paid for it. The true money was made when the CD was sold retail. Amazing, isn't it? So now then, really: What is the business model going forward?
All business models are risky, you can make a copyright material and no one may like it and you may lose profits. Or people will like it and you will gain profits.
This is true with or without copyright. Someone may sign with the RIAA and end up profiting little. Or their music maybe a hit and they may make money. If someone gives away their music and people don't like it what makes you think they will like the music if people had to pay for it? If you mistrust your fans then why should they trust and appreciate you? Why should people respect you when you assume they all take your music and give you nothing.
People donate money to charity though I don't really do that much anymore ever since I found out that most charitable organizations keep like 95 percent of the money and give maybe 5 percent to those who actually need it. Still, I give money to my local church.
If there is a need people are willing to fund it and if you're just going to adopt a business model that assumes all your fans want to scam you then don't be surprised when you lose those fans. You assume, "the business model that maximizes profits, even if it requires government regulations to do so, is the best one.
With this attitude you can expect to lose fans. No, you are confusing the ability to charge anything with massive overcharging. If you don't think the price of a CD or the price of a DVD hasn't been finely calculated, you need to go back and get an education.
There is nothing artificially scarce about something sold in huge volumes at retail in a huge number of stores worldwide. That is a totally BS expression you picked up hanging around places like this.
Mass production of recordings pretty much since the time of wax has pretty much made these things as common as dust. The mistake is assuming that the price has anything to do with the plastic, rather than the material on the plastic. If we only charged money for the container things were in, pretty much everything would be cheap, because most things come in cardboard boxes that only cost a few cents. Delivered on CD, in digital form, or whatever, music has a market price notice I don't say value that is similar in all case.
The great gods of "name you price" sold more CDs for retail price at retail in the first week of release than they did in their entire "name your price" process.
The name your price process would have made In Rainbows the lowest selling album of their career. So then why are you complaining about RIAA losing all this profit and losing fans and customers on the one hand and then saying that you're making good money on the other? Which is it? You just said it, you made money, so then what's the problem?
That you're not making more money? What's wrong with that? Nothing, and it would be unethical for you to try and resort to government intervention to "fix" it. Competition sucks, we know, but there is nothing unethical about it. No one owes you more money, if you can't make more money in the free market thanks to competition then that's your problem, stop crying to the FCC to try to force radio stations to play your music and pay you for it stop trying to extort money out of others.
I will go into this with the understanding that you know the costs involved with press a compact disc vs vinyl and the industry decision to move to CDs over vinyl and tape.
Let me be frank. You're being a royal fucking dick. You're exaggerating your value. What do you do? What the hell do labels do again? I'm still trying to figure that out. The problem is, manufacturing doesn't cost zero. Oh, let me resolve one other issue for you: I don't work for the RIAA, I don't work for a record company, I am not a musician, I am not a record seller.
I have zero, nothing, absolutely no connection to the music industry. So it isn't "my" product. But they do cost to ship, they do cost to stock hint, rent for a store isn't at the level it was in the 70s , and so on.
If you want to compare the future to the future, you have to work on current numbers, not the "piss them off" numbers that amateur debaters use to try to make themselves look good. So le me be frank: You are using extremely tilted numbers, and you are telling a lie.
I suggest you go to your local record store walmart would do and research the price of current CDs. Then come back and explain yourself again. Alan Gerow profile , 17 Aug pm. In one regard, if no one has heard your music, no one is going to pay money for it.
In the other regard, people are willing to try free music, may like it, and may give you money after the fact for a job well done. There's likely to be 1, business models that work on different strengths for different people with different goals. Some people want to make a bunch of money, some people want to get heard by a bunch of people Or is that the RIAA's solution? Wait until someone way smarter than them tells them what is going to work.
Instead of actually figuring anything out for themselves? Unfortunately, they aren't listening to anyone to hear the messages. Funny if you look at it as an outsider And two last words before I stop using this stupid cell phone It's called "Creative Accounting" or "Hollywood Accounting" and unfortunately, their culture of "success" has been a model for some of the biggest companies, and now there is a desire to legitimize it.
Point is, they have something that follows the rule of the law, but deviates from the spirit in which the law was written. Those are the ONLY two options? Quite frankly, there's hundreds of thousands of options available to them. You've taken the two extremes, and completely discounted the infinite levels in between.
How about not suing people, and not closing up shop? There's a third option right there. Tons of people are still buying CDs, tons of people are buying mp3s, how about focusing on keeping those customers happy instead of worrying about people who aren't paying?
How about abandoning charging for listening to music, and instead monetize other parts of the process? Charge for live music, exclusive pre-sales with incentives to pay for music production, merchandising, commercial licensing? Let people "steal" music, but charge for everything else around it?
And if it were a functional business model, then wouldn't it be functioning? But you're saying it's not functioning, so it's by definition an non-functional business model. Lucretious , 14 Aug pm.
Obsidian , 14 Aug pm. I see the paid industry shills are still around. Go away, trolls. It's like saying a rusted out car that is up on blocks in someone's front yard is 'functional'. The only thieves are the RIAA execs and their extortion racket. When that happens, you RIAA shill's are going to have to go back to your jobs as minimum wage clerks at a convenience store.
Then again, maybe you can become a literal prostitute. You're already used to being whores and getting screwed for money. Thomas profile , 14 Aug pm. What's disgusting is your complete misunderstanding of the situation, AC. The alternatives are to innovate, adapt, advance compete. It is obviously not a functional business model if some new technology comes along and trashes it. It has ceased to be functional. It needs to change. Rather than trusting the reviewersthe people who are basically advertising the product to the masses and ensuring people will bother to buy it at all, piracy or no piracythe RIAA has come up with what must be the most hair-brained scheme in the history of piracy: voice overs.
Anyone who has seen a pre-release 'screener' of a major film will be familiar with the scrolling text that crops up at varying points of the film, warning you that if you're watching this and you're not a reviewer then you're killing Jesus' puppy or something. The RIAA decided that these were a good idea, and set about inserting a similar concept into pre-release music.
But how to replicate the non-intrusive scrolly text in a purely auditory environment? Meh, why bother: they'll put up with the music fading out occasionally to be replaced with a voicefor some reason with an Italian accenttelling you how naughty it would be to steal the broken copy they've provided you with.
Many reviewers are up in arms about such an intrusive system of basically telling them they're criminal scum who are not to be trusted, and at least one is making his feelings known in a very public way.
TheSpunkyLobster, a contributor to music site Komodo Rock, has published a review of one such album featuring this 'protection' that is extremely scathing of the 'technology'.
Way to go, guys.
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