Let Them Eat Cake
john posted in politics & culture, technologies on October 4th, 2007
After yesterday’s Jawfish piece about inexorable corporate aggrandizement , comes the news that one of the record industry’s lawsuits has netted an initial fine of $222,000 against a woman who shared files on the Kazaa p2p network. A clear case of robbing the poor to pay the lawyers, and likely yet another jury which doesn’t understand the issues of the case.
The RIAA is the recording industry trade group. They have been suing users (their own customers, really) who share music over the Internet. See Napster, Kazaa, Limewire and others. While this is technically legal, it’s the product of tortured logic from a dying industry who can still command legislators to bail them out. The size of the judgment is ridiculous on the face of it, but the law is often, and famously, an ass.
Daily Tech says:
The RIAA adds a notch to its belt of legal victories
“This is what can happen if you don’t settle,” said RIAA attorney Richard Gabriels, speaking to reporters just outside the Duluth, Minnesota Courthouse, minutes after Jammie Thomas was found liable for copyright infringement to the tune of $222,000.
Thomas, a single mom with two kids, left the courthouse without comment and did not speak with reporters.
Under the username “Tereastarr,” Thomas was found sharing just over 1,700 files via the Kazaa network on February 21, 2005. Of those 1,700 tracks, 24 were named – including music from popular artists such as AFI, Green Day, and Aerosmith – and for each one she was held liable for $9,250 worth of damages, coming to a grand total of $222,000….
Background:
Kazaa is a file sharing network. It’s a very clever idea: in essence users agree to store and share files with other users and central servers keep databases of what files are available and where they are. This benefits the server organization by greatly reducing load; it benefits the Internet by increasing efficiency; and users get the enhanced service for free. There is not a city block in America without a teenager sharing 1000’s of files on these networks, and the software industry uses bitTorrent a more sophisticated version to share files. If you want to argue that sharing music files without charge is like stealing a physical CD from the record store, then you have to explain why streaming music over the Internet or broadcasting it from a radio isn’t. Using the same sort of tortured logic as the industry, I’ll point out that since the files have all been ripped to MP3s, they aren’t even the same ( in the binary sense) as the original.
In the this same week a well-known band ( even I have heard of them) Radiohead announced it would sell its new album over the Internet and allow users to pay nothing or whatever they want.
Most independent industry observers and Internet gurus are firmly against the RIAA and the Brahmins of the record business. I see the conflict as the fallout from a huge change in all the media from traditional business models to Internet-based models. The Phil Spectors do not go gently into the night.
Further Reading:
The defender of Internet user’s rights, Electronic Frontier Foundation
an article on the bad business of RIAA suing its own customers, Motley Fool
What’s your view?
October 4th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
I think that this is another scary symptom of deteriorating science and math education in America. You need to actually examine the assumptions and postulates behind people’s ideas and arguments. The problem with that jury was most likely that fancy lawyering fooled them to that fact that they were effectively assuming that all those people who listened to music for free would have bought it and that none of them went out and bought some of it because the listened to it for free and liked it. These assumptions are on the face of it ridiculous-think about how many times you may have tried something for free-whether a legitimate free sample or not-and try and figure out when, if any of those times, would you have bought the product simply because no free sample were available.
I have to wonder, though since I don’t really think the RIAA are idiots, if they just don’t care what it may do to business in the medium to long run as long as it makes the individuals in charge look good /effective right now.
Also, maybe they had lousy science education as well and do not understand the absurdity of making sweeping assumptions without justifying them in some way-in other words very bad science.
We need to drill the scientific method into people!!!
(Then maybe once in a while they will actually look for evidence to justify assumptions-or at least understand when they are making them.)
October 5th, 2007 at 9:17 am
Well the RIAA itself gets paid to do what it does for the industry. So from their POV, whatever the record industry wants is the right thing. The industry itself has been run like a plantation for decades, and they are just now getting a reality-check.
To me it’s absurd to spend $100,000 ( or much more) on producing a pop band - either they can play or they can’t. Unfortunately they mostly can’t play, and the *sound* depends on studio gimmicks. But I don’t like pop music, so maybe I am not being fair.
October 9th, 2007 at 12:38 am
If deteriorating education standards is indeed at the root of the jury decision, perhaps the record industry executives are equally affected:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/03/riaa-our-antifan-law.html
Seems like rational decision making is hard to come by anywhere.
October 9th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Well my only personal contact with the entertainment industry has been with NBC Burbank and Warner Brothers Records. If they are an example then about half the managers are pretty smart and work really hard, and the other half make Paris Hilton, Leona Helmsley, and Donald trump look like angels.