BleepingComputer.com: Jury awards RIAA $1.9m (for 24 songs!) in retrial

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/06/18/minnes...fine/index.html

I personally think piracy is going to be the framework for a new 2.0-style business model that the industry simply has yet to get behind. The current industry pricing model for music+album content in addition to the ease of ... alternative distribution methods are the two primary causes for piracy. IMO, of course.

But it's frighteningly disingenuous... No, it's a flat-out lie that piracy hurts the recording industry in any fundamental way. The copy machine didn't kill Waldenbooks, VCRs didn't kill VHS, optical media didn't kill movies and mucis, and p2p isn't going to kill them, either.

I haven't done the market research yet, but something tells me that you'll see a noticable - maybe not "significant" - uptake in album or single sales, after a piece of work hits the torrents. Free distribution of digital media promotes sales, and the recent release of a number of anime and cartoon series on youtube, followed by box sets on the shelf PROVE that digital distribution does NOT kill the model ("Code Geass," btw is exceptionally awesome!).

Company by company, it's catching on, but the RIAA and several other industry reps need to get over this luddite paradigm. Seriously.

how did she get caught? maybe i should use proxies...

*AmazingAndrew minimizes uTorrent and Frostwire

Eh? What's that?

[quote name='ooweirdoo' post='1306104' date='Jun 20 2009, 12:00 AM']how did she get caught? maybe i should use proxies...[/quote]
she was behind 7 proxies but still got caught...

I think a lot of times, if a person downloads the music and likes it enough, they WILL buy it. With the economy the way it is, I don't think many people are willing to spend around 15 dollars for a CD that they don't need that turns out to be bad.

I think if anything she should have just paid the 99cents for each song and that's it. 1.9mil is very excessive...Which is probably around what most popular musicians make in a month or two anyways.

Also, I think the person who uploads the music for free download should be the one who gets fined, for putting up a 'free product' anyways.

also just minimised frostwire and bittorrent...

wow... lol, really sucks!

Does the RIAA actually think that they will get that money from her? Really? A middle-class mom with four kids? REALLY?

If she loses the appeal, she'll have to file for bankruptcy; the fine will most likely get reduced in bankruptcy court. Or, she'll win the appeal, and the fine will either get thrown out or reduced. The RIAA will never see that much money, so what was the point of awarding them that much money? For 24 songs? Really?



Ridiculous.... And, at the risk of stating the obvious, illegal downloads will not stop. Sorry RIAA, but people are gonna keep at it. You can't put the genie back in the bottle after its been set free.

This doesn't make sense. Why not just fine the woman the $.99 each song cost? And if that's too "light" as a punishment, then up the cost to $100... but to make the fine $80000 per song? Ridiculous.

[quote name='blackchaos93' post='1308601' date='Jun 22 2009, 10:41 AM']if that's too "light" as a punishment, then up the cost to $100... but to make the fine $80000 per song? Ridiculous.[/quote]

I agree... seems a bit TO much...

Time to get out the boy cotts

I think she should countersue for free advertising of the songs.

[quote name='blackchaos93' post='1308601' date='Jun 21 2009, 08:41 PM']This doesn't make sense. Why not just fine the woman the $.99 each song cost? And if that's too "light" as a punishment, then up the cost to $100... but to make the fine $80000 per song? Ridiculous.[/quote]


The theory is that she did not "steal" by downloading, but by sharing. Downloading music in and of itself is not illegal per se, but making it available for someone else to download is.

The theory is that by sharing files/music, you are taking a proportionate amount of money from the publisher, so, if three people downloaded one song from you, you would be liable to the cost of that song, three times. since they have never been able to actually prove who downloaded what from whom (given the nature of p2p networks and unknown amounts of proxies, etc, etc (the very things that make torrents great)) they can try to charge as much as they want for the offense by saying it's an "estimated" amount of damages. convenient, no?

I'm all about freedom of information, but pirating creative works is something that I try my best to avoid. I may download something to try, but if I like it, I go buy it, preferably directly from the source if I can. The problem I have with pirating creative works is that it's not really information (at least not in the normal sense) and creators need to eat just as well as the rest of us. If a creator can't eat, he/she can't create.

These are merely the death throes of a tired, worn-out industry. The freedom of information and communication in these coming decades are going to empower creators like never before. Never has it been so easy to create, produce, mix, master, and publish your own album (/book/movie/etc.) and it will only become easier as time goes on.

Say your prayers BMG, EMI, Elektra, and so on, you will soon wake up to a world that no longer needs you, indeed, a world that despises you and will string you up by your hamstrings for the rape and pillaging of our creative works. heh.

Well said case.bolt.

What irks me is that the record companies (and others, they're not alone here) act as though Copyright is some sort of inalienable, perpetual right of theirs rather than a concession by society to spur creative works. Copyright grants the creator of a work a limited monopoly over that work. The last century saw that limited monopoly get stretched and stretched beyond all intentions of the Copyright Clause.

I agree that the Copyright concept, originally intended to protect artists so they did not REQUIRE a sponsor like the king or a wealthy patron, has turned into a BigBusiness concept which involves a third-party industry to utilize an original work. The number of people who are getting rich because of the music industry (as well as the publishing industry) is relatively small in comparison to the number of people creating original works. The possibility for distribution of creative works could be fairly easily changed, if all royalties for original works went to the creator of the work, rather than through the distributor of the original work. In other words, if you could buy directly from the creator of the work, without having to pay the middle money-making business, then the money might end up where it's supposed to be with regard to the actual original copyright principles. If you want to then extend the copyright principles to say that it is the middle business people whose work is copyrighted, then it is no longer a valid concept with regard to the original work, because it is spreading the credit for the original work across a whole constellation of people and businesses. It's certainly long been known that the music industry expoits this concept for the single purpose of making money. They do this to the point of the death of their most-money-making artists.

The copyright concept was a good thing 20-100 years ago when creators needed the protection... but that protection (like so many other cases of the same) has turned into extortion. But the issue of copyright isn't really the key point here, but who actually holds the copyright in question.

In most cases, (and this is true in any creative endeavor) the creator does not have the money to publish and distribute their works, so they turn to an outside source (record label/publisher/art dealer) who does this for them. Now, in the case of the record labels, they pay the artist for the copyright, effectively purchasing it from them, while taking out all promotional costs from that purchase price. The same happens with book publishers quite often, although it is the publisher that does the same, and commercial art dealers (and some private ones) do the same to their artists. Even wonder where all that factory-art comes from? bingo.

So, the problem is really farther reaching than just music... it really affects all aspects of creative work. Now that the technology is cheap enough and available for nearly anyone to do what the labels/publishers/dealers do, this is going to change. How much easier would it be for an artist to publish their own works online through a GPL? How many artists have begun to do this are successful? quite a few actually. check it: http://www.futureofmusic.org/ and there's many more sites/orgs just like this for artists of all types. good stuff.

So where do libraries fit in? They have been sharing copyrighted material forever. If I go to the library and borrow a book to read, I don't have to buy that book - thereby depriving the author of income.