In the heyday of Napster and AudioGalaxy, it seemed like every single song imaginable at one point in time was available to anyone hooked up to the Internet — no charge.
Grokster and Morpheus are a few more names on the long list of peer-2-peer networks laid to waste by the Recording Industry Association of America with the help of the federal government.
“P2P, or peer-to-peer, does not stand for ‘permission to pilfer,'” said Attorney General John Ashcroft in a U.S. Justice Department hearing in late August.
While no one laughed at Mr. Ashcroft’s joke, his message was clear.
“You can pay the fair value for movies, music, software and games like every other consumer, or you can pay a much higher price when you are caught committing online theft,” Ashcroft said.
He vowed prosecutors will continue to go after online criminals. File sharing creates real criminals and they have punished few to make an example for the rest. A 12-year-old girl settled out of court in February by paying $2,000 to the RIAA for sharing a few dozen MP3 music files online.
It’s all too convenient for the RIAA — comprised of the five biggest record companies in the U.S. — to blame the 15 billion dollar slump in record sales on internet file sharing. Is picking the pocket of each file sharing “pirate” how the RIAA plans to meet its net quota?
If a restaurant doesn’t reach the expectations of the customer, the restaurant must improve the quality of their service rather than sue their former customers to make up for a margin of lost profit.
The music featured on mainstream radio does not stack up to the glory days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Artists of yesteryear were exactly that — artists.
Compared with today’s mainstream superstar acts like Linkin Park and Britney Spears, it’s easy to see why the 2000s music consumers slowly began trading in mainstream mediums of music like TV and radio for a PC and modem.
The search for lost profits leads the lawsuit machine down every road possible. They’ve sued children, why not people that don’t share files on the Internet at all?
XM Satellite Radio subscriber Scott Maclean developed a recording program on his computer that converts XM broadcasts into MP3 files so he can hear broadcasts “when I was asleep or out.”
The program made available via open source transfer on the Internet and this move created legal problems for the Sony-owned XM company. The end result was the RIAA ordering a legal investigation into the situation.
Whether or not MacLean should be allowed to record every single radio broadcast he desires is in question only because he gave his software away on the Internet.
“It’s very hard for policy and copyright law to keep up with the pace of technological change,” said Michael McGuire, an analyst at the technology research firm Gartner.
Fox Chief Executive Peter Chernin told the media: “Filmmakers can offer their audience a choice of ways to see movies — they can view them in the theater, rent them or buy them. … Music companies are much less flexible.”
It’s no wonder the legal file transfers were so successful on the Internet.
“It is not correct to assume that every time a copy is made, a sale is lost,” said Gary Shapiro, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association.
He added, “Computers and other gadgets that enable people to copy music or download MP3s, have seen their sales fall much more sharply.”
It’s hard to download an MP3 player from peer to peer networks these days. Since these statements were made, several Web sites owned by the RIAA have reduced the price of legal file downloads in half at the demand of the consumer.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
The consumer with a guilty conscience can’t take every word the RIAA says as fact. They should see these lawsuits for what they are — a deterrent. They’re suing children.
They’re suing their own paying customers.
