New RIAA File-swapping Suits Target Students 287
Fletcher writes "The Recording Industry Association of America filed another round of lawsuits against alleged file-swappers, including students on 13 university campuses.
The 750 suits come just a few days after Internet researchers released a study that found peer-to-peer traffic had remained constant or risen up to the early days of 2004, despite the pressure of recording industry lawsuits."
RIAA again going for the little guy (Score:4, Interesting)
For one, you can't stop it by going after people that don't have enough money to pay for cds. CDs printing costs are in like the cents (30-70 cents) to make the CD ready for packaging.
They charged 15 dollars for most. Only give the artist maybe 70cents-1 dollar for each record sold. If they ultimately actually lowered the price to a more convient number maybe people will by them.
Or even maybe have them actually good music to purchase. Going after college students who have enough to worry about is a horrible way to get support. Its a negative campaign that'll end up hurting them.
P2P via anonymous proxies (Score:4, Interesting)
Time To Strong-Arm Colleges and Universities (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, well, at least it's a good education in the way the outside world "works".
All your child are belong to us ! (Score:5, Interesting)
And I will not till they stop this BS. Remember all these losers back in the 60's and 70's I'm sure they copied there buddies music if they liked it.
It's the same shit.
The way to stop this crap is boycott music period. Listen to the radio if you must. A one year boycott and they will crumble like a cracker in a vise.
What's the difference if you get it off the net or get it off FM? I'm sure if they like the music they'll go and buy it to support the band so they can make more for them to enjoy.
Re:Who's being sued? (Score:2, Interesting)
Nowadays I'd always see these little posters around the computer labs in uni reminding users that downloading pirated stuff is illegal and that we can be jailed for it yadda yadda..
Needless to say every machine is now firewalled like nuts now.
Way to go RIAA
Current IP List? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:P2P via anonymous proxies (Score:4, Interesting)
Server A sends random encrypted bytes from the material requested and Server B fills in the blanks. Sent non-sequentially or out of play order and they'll have a tough time figuring out what the hell is being downloaded.
Re:RIAA again going for the little guy (Score:5, Interesting)
And so we go and install I2P (Score:4, Interesting)
Get your copy here [i2p.net]. It's an onion-routing network, and open mix-net if you like. It protects your anonimity by using a number of proxies to channel the data, and encrypting the data such that one always knows only the next hop to send it to.
In contrast to, e.g., Ants or MUTE, finding your data scales as log(N) (N: number of nodes in the net), whereas Ants and MUTE scale as N^2. And in contrast to Freenet and friends, this actually works.
Now, you can already just put all your music files in the eepsite/docroot folder of your install, and post your key on forum.i2p. That's enough for anonymous sharing.
Even better: A BitTorrent system that works completely within I2P is in the works ;)
Re:students or university (Score:2, Interesting)
You wouldn't either want to blame the goverment for crimes which they could prevent or reduce if they only imposed complete surveillance on everybody, would you ?
I, for one, hope they will not even try blaming it on the universities and am confident they won't try, because it would support the RIAA's stance to require more surveillance and control on neutral technologies like the networks in general(internet, p2p, university ones).
Correction ... Again... Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't mind repeating this like a broken record. Eventually everybody will get it. Musicians usually get paid NOTHING for CD sales. Yes, by contract they get a small percentage, but that same contract also lets the record company first deduct all expenses of manufacturing, advertising, distribution, etc, etc, which usually leaves a ZERO net payment. For a more detailed explanation of how this works, read this article by Janis Ian [janisian.com], who has recorded more than 25 albums over nearly 40 years, and has yet to see a record company check with a plus sign on it.
The short version is: Musicians make money primarily from live performances, same as they did for centuries before recording technology was invented. What CD sales do for them is give them exposure, which generates audiences for concerts. They get the same exposure whether you buy a CD, download it, listen to it on the radio or find it lying on the sidewalk. Paying for the CD does not help the musician.
Record companies, on the other hand, make nearly ALL their money from CD sales. They justify all their business practices because they lose money on the songs that don't sell well enough to cover expenses. Essentially record companies are venture capitalists who seize all profits from a company until the startup expenses are covered, and then continue to get most of the profits after that.
Would you finance your startup like that? I didn't think so.
Re:RIAA again going for the little guy (Score:3, Interesting)
"I love how DVDs' prices are decreasing and will one day be lower than audio CDs' prices. How is it possible for such an old technology to be so expensive? (I know the answer but I'd really like their point of view...)"
The average price of a CD is down to $13.29 [npd.com]. That's a historic low, and the price drop is accelerating. DVDs are typically priced at $19 or $20, so DVD prices have a long way to go before they meet CD prices.
The "old technology" involved in a CD -- the pressing -- is one of the less significant costs of production. A finished CD with jewel case and artwork runs around a buck in the quantities typically produced. Even if that cost were to magically go down to zero tomorrow, the cost to the consumer of a CD would only drop by a couple of bucks. The rest of the costs of a CD are things that have risen with inflation -- ie. rent, salaries, shipping costs, and so on.
Re:RIAA again going for the little guy (Score:2, Interesting)
You might not want that soundtrack clobbered by dialogue and sound effects when you listen to it to apreciate its artistry divorced from the movie.
Only a 'handfull' of scores are good enough to stand alone as 'serious music' without the movie.
Here are some of them.
John Williams - E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Jurrasic Park, Superman
Jerry Goldsmith - Patton, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Total Recall, Supergirl
James Horner - Battle Beyond The Stars, Brainstorm, Krull, Glory, Titanic
Trevor Jones - The Dark Crystal
Vangelis - Chariots Of Fire, Blade Runner
Howard Shore - The 3 Lord Of The Ring scores.
Wendy Carlos - TRON
Elmer Bernstein - The Ten Commandments, Heavy Metal
Lee Holdridge - Splash, The Mists Of Avalon
Alex North - Spartacus, Cleopatra, Dragonslayer
Hanz Zimmer - The Lion King
Enjoy!
recording mp3s from internet radio stations (Score:2, Interesting)
I see this like recording songs from the radio or movies/shows from the tv which im not too sure of but is legal.. right?
How would this be looked at by the RIAA?
My answers are... (Score:1, Interesting)
Selling on the web usually involves some method of payment. Options are: Direct electronic fund transfer (which would involve cooperation from the bank system), credit card (needing cooperation from CC companies), or PayPal (requiring cooperation from a bunch of irresponsible jerks). I very much doubt that a bank would even consider doing business with as loose an outfit as an OSS development team, so its highly unlikely that any form of cash payment system could be centralized in a project like this. In other words, anyone setting up as a distributor would probably still need to jump through all the same business hoops as they would setting up an ordinary e-commerce site. Net gain: nil.
"I imagine the system wouldn't be a terribly hard coding problem, there is already some online store software about."
Existing e-commerce software doesn't care whether you're selling CDs, bicycles or nuclear hand-grenades, it accepts a payment and issues a shipping order for one unit. Most of this can be done in Perl or Java if you like, but if you haven't got that all-important agreement with a banking provider, you have no link to cash in the real world. Without that, all the coding in the world is useless.
"As for offering it as a service, it wouldn't be too hard to cover up for the bandwidth/hosting costs and still allow musical artists to keep much of the profit themselves."
I'm nitpicking here, but "profit" is taken after "expenses", which normally includes things like bandwith and hosting. If you wish to do the calculations, you take your fixed costs (hosting for "X" GB of data/month, advertising budget, staff/consultant costs, warehousing if you're selling physical CDs), estimate your variable costs (bandwidth, payments to artists, shipping, credit service fees) and work from there. Just pulling figures out of my ass: lets say 10GB@$10/month hosting, weelky ads in a local music rag or banners($80?), ignore staff costs for the moment, office is a garage (equivalent to $20/week rent), so your fixed costs (assuming you're donating your time for free) are $410. Here's where we really start guesing: let's say you expect 5,000 downloads in your first month (not with that pathetic advertising budget, but never mind). Free bandwidth isn't exceeded, so no extra charge there; credit services, say, 10 cents/transaction (though it must be said, micropayments are a pain for any financial institution so that figure is probably way too low), which gives us a total cost of 18 cents per song sold. At 5000 sales, each extra employee adds 10 cents/sale, and rent for a devoted premesis adds a whopping 40 cents/sale. So for a very small business keeping one person employed in an office, we're looking at 68 cents COST per sale, before anyone makes a profit. I haven't even counted the musicians' cut, but as you can see there isn't a lot left over from $1; a 50-50 split between distributor and musician gives each 16, which, purely coincidentally, is about what artists make from iTMS. And remember, you don't gain anything through economies of scale like you do with physical CD manufacture, more downloads simply cost more.
And that's without a physical product, which adds warehouse space, shipping costs and wholesale purchase costs (unless we all trust each other enough to do everything on consignment...music business, handshake agreement? Yeah, right...)
"With new developments such as FLAC, it wouldn't be hard to distribute replicas of albums online, without the middle man."
The problem isn't the technology. The problem is convincing enough musicians that this is a viable way of doing business. I'm afraid that won't happen without some kind of DRM option (I'm all for a respect based system; if someone uses DRM, you should respect their wishes that they don't want their work copied, not treat it as a challenge; and if you object to an artist using DRM, find someone else to listen to w
*Ahem* (Score:3, Interesting)
Nevermind that copyright was a priviledge granted on the condition that it should eventually, after a limited time benifit society and culture by release into the public domain. With the new de-facto perputual copyright, the grounds on which the priviledge was granted is gone. So is my respect for copyright.
If you have any difficulty comprehending this simple connection, well I'll bother you again some time later.