New Jersey woman who has been sued by RIAA sues back

Good for her!

I sincerely doubt she'll prevail but, hopefully, this will have a chilling effect on the RIAA's rampage (here's the appropriate emoticon for their stinkin' John Doe subpoenas: :bootyshake

OTOH, the RIAA folks must be messing themselves thinking what might happen if this thing gets past a motion to dismiss (or summary judgment) and gets into the hands of a jury. They've alienated damn near the entire country by suing 13 year old girls.

 

that's great! thanks for posting the article.

i still don't understand these people suing their bread and butter. especially when metallica was doing it. they were actively suing their own fans for downloading metallica songs. :roll:

 

Yes - everyone is entitled to make money. But how much of the $16-20 that one pays for a CD actually goes to the artist, and not some greedy record company execs? I think it's around $1-2. That's ridiculous to me, so until things change, I'll use iTunes and occasionally LimeWire (there! I said it... brb, John Ashcroft is knocking on my door.)

 

I may be duplicating what someelse has already said, the facts are simple, it's not about the artists, it's about the recording companies inability to change as the market changed, the markets make the rules, not the industries.
We're starting to see a parrellel in the radio industry, XM/Sirius vs am/fm, what's Clear Channel if and when they start to loose market share, cry wolf???????????????

 

Efusco, the vast majority of the music I listen to doesn't get airplay. How are you supposed to know if the album is worth the money? All the RIAA is, is a sour grapes measure to "get back" at the market that they refused to acknowledge existed. IMO, the best thing that RIAA can do, is kill itself, and allow the new pay to d/l sites do their thing. I for one, hope that the gal wins. RIAA has attempted to dodge constitutional law in their efforts to go after people. Quite hypocritical in my opinion that a "law enforcement" organization usurps laws that slow their progress.

 

While downloading is illegal, so is price gouging. Just recently I received my (long awaited) check from the CD MAP Antitrust Litigation for that whopping total of $13.86.

www.musiccdsettlement.com has all the info in case you didn't know about this - if you didn't, unfortunately it's too late to get some of your lost expenses back.

-m.

 

me, too, on duplication, but...

http://www.plusaf.com/soapbox/dearriaa.htm

 

Well, before the advent of records, there was no "record industry" but musicians still made money. The whole point of "records" was that you could hear a musician's work after the fact... Or play your favorite radio songs on demand.

It was *NEVER* meant to be the farse that is the RIAA today. There's MILLIONS of musicians out there, but only 20-50 or so are actively getting promoted by the big 5 labels at any given time. As a matter of fact, less than 1% of the money the music labels make gets put back into promoting artists. ...and it's not because millions of musicians make bad music.

Also think about this: Why have the record labels at all? With Internet distribution there's no reason to purchase physical media. All the labels do these days is act as promotion and marketing firms who collect a marjority of an artists sales. Wouldn't it be better for a band to simply hire a marketing agency and put up a website?

That model would be MUCH better for music than the way things currently work... Only it'll never happen as long as the RIAA is around. Why? Because they control the airwaves too. What you hear on the radio is bought & paid for. 99% of all *new* artists you hear on the radio had their music played because a record label paid to have them aired & promoted. Also, unless you belong to this exclusive club, your money isn't even "good" to companies like ClearChannel. In order to start getting your tracks played on a regular basis, you need a multi-million dollar contract. This is why the RIAA keeps getting convicted of monopolistic policies and racketeering.

Example: Isn't funny how MTV always has a video ready to go for just about every "new" artist that comes along? Week one: Extremely heavy airplay of a manufactured song. Week two: MTV premieres videos of young "artist(s)" who all happen to be gorgeous. Week three: The CDs go on sale. Week six: Concert tour. If successful, the band gets their own clothing line, they get put on various TV shows, etc.

You think some band of locals had all that ready to go? I don't think so.

So with the current method of music distribution, how's a no-name band going to get airplay? How are they going to make headway into mainstream music? The current best way is with peer-to-peer distribution and Internet radio.

Thanks to the RIAA's efforts, having an Internet radio station is now more expensive than having the broadcast kind, so the best bet there is foreign stations and illegal stations that don't pay royalties.

So that leaves peer-to-peer as the best *and* most efficient way to distribute music. It gets aritsts ear-time for listeners they might never otherwise communicate to and increases the likelyhood of them getting "discovered".

The only bad thing about the peer-to-peer system is that it works the same way as tipping... And unless a cultural change takes place, only the "nice" people will be donating to their favorite bands.

...and no matter what you might think, if people suddenly don't make money from music, people will still make music. If money was the only reason to make music, we wouldn't have been making it for thousands of years.

 

This topic I find so very funny. I dont know if you guys have it, but movie theaters around me have this anti-download promo thing before the movie. It is a stunt man talking about how dangerous his job is and how he is being hurt by all this. Give me a break! MY fiance is friends with a models designer (he did the matrixs). He gets paid one set price regardless if the movie flops or succeeds. I realize in the music industry that is a bit different, but not by that much. Only a choice few people get the option of profit sharing, the rest just get paid for their work. I am a big fan of the dollar a movie downloads.

 

Not to mention the fact that a stunt man is 4000x more likely to lose his job due to your computer animator friend than he ever would to pirate downloaders.

First stuntmen and prop makers. Next, camera men and then actors (and associated professions like makeup).

 

I'm usually very quiet and reserved but when I see that "don't download psa" in the movies I start yelling at the screen that they are all a bunch of idiots and that I just paid a bunch of money to see them yammer at me as if I was a criminal. They are the criminals for making and playing that!

I'm trying to get all my friends to do it too so that they stop playing them at movie theatres. If it was on a DVD or VHS, I could *maybe* see it. But if you just paid nearly $20 a pop ( $ 18 ) to see Return of the King it is just pure WRONG.

That is my 2 cents...well, $18 really...

 

"Downloading" is not illegal or wrong as most of you sem to think. It is no different than someone lending a CD/DVD to a friend. No court has ruled it to be ilegal yet and, in fact, in Holland and Canada it has been held as perfectely legal. I have NO sympathy for someone losing a hypothetical 2 million from "piracy" when they are already making 10-20 million a year.

 

You guys need to live in Canada - it's perfectly legal (so far) to download music here (so long as you don't upload anything)

But the real reason for my post was some ire at the music industry in general that's pushing people towards piracy.

For example, one of my favorite artists just released a new single, which is exclusively on iTunes to purchase. Great!

Except that due to industry wrangling, the iTunes Store isn't available in Canada. So no matter how much I want to purchase that new track (and I would've in a second), I was forced to go and "find" it on the net instead as a stopgap until I can buy the CD when it's released in October.

So as much as the music industry makes noise about trying to be progressive and promote legal downloading, they still have a way to go.

A lot of the music I listen to is Japanese, and the artists and studios there have been taking a different approach in many cases. When you buy a CD, you get included coupons with special one-time access codes to register for restricted fan-websites, exclusive photos and multimedia, etc. A number of artists are also including promotional DVDs with a couple of music videos, some behind the scenes production footage, maybe a few interviews, etc. And the price is only around $5-10 more than a release without the extras.

The value-added features are a decent draw to actually purchasing a legit CD (I usually spend a grand or so a year importing stuff for myself because of the extra value over just downloading it).

Dave

 

My house just got a "cease and desist letter" citing a few big name movie studios who watched *someone* at our house download some of their movies. They contacted our cable internet provider and threatened them till they sent us the letter. We are terrified and instantly everyone in the house stopped downloading stuff. I switched to Itunes long before this happened and I no longer download movies because I work in the movie industry and I realized that I was being hypocritical. But I don't blame other people in the household for downloading whatever they want. It's a personal choice.

Now we are all scared because one person's downloading habits can condemn us all to having our personal computers and storage disks (probably my ipod as well) seized and never returned. 5 of us share the internet connection in our house. This has happened to people in the past. And there's no legal grounds to get stuff back.

A friend of mine told me about this guy he knew back at the dawn of the computer boom who had a business making D&D type games that he described as modern punk type adventures. The government somehow took this to mean they were writing books on how to be a hacker and seized all of their computers. They quickly found out they were mistaken but the computers were never returned no matter how hard the business fought to get them back. You're probably well aware how expensive computers were at this time. They immediately went out of business.