RIAA, The New Playground Bully

[D-Bone]

I hate them more and more each day. Just look at this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/32731.html

[Dante]

As RIAA Cary Sherman cowardly states:
But when your product is being regularly stolen, there comes a time when you have to take appropriate action.
And this appropriate action involves children now. Will the RIAA draw no decency lines with their crusade?!? What kind of damage are they doing to a highly potential customer that hasn't EVEN begun her prime spending years? Not to mention the totally caulis addition of mental stress on this poor girl.

I hope the public gets more enraged by this and gets active against this mega bully. Too bad it took a poor 12 year old causualty to make people really shake their heads at this.

DOWN WITH THE GIANT!!

[Malice]

Words cannot express the insanity. Are you sure Richard Guy isn't president of the RIAA cause this looks like his handywork.

[Uncle Freddie]

Well. This is thje vgideo we pLay in bReakrooOm. MayBe that gIrl cAn leArn froM it.

http://albinoblacksheep.com/video/floppy.php

[Dante]

Well. This is thje vgideo we pLay in bReakrooOm. MayBe that gIrl cAn leArn froM it.

http://albinoblacksheep.com/video/floppy.php

oh lord.... you just had to bring that here, didn't you.... :|

[Malice]

Well, lets see. D-Bone and I watched the whole thing and found the copyright at the end was 1992. I think I have probaby copied at least 200 games since then. D-Bone probably more. So at last count the software industry was doing ok, only worth a couple of billion. Plus I want that guys CD, he was bangin.

[Dante]

/begin rant

So the latest on the 12 year old girl is that she settled proving quite clearly that the RIAA are not going after the significant sources of file swapping, but preferring to strike fear in the hearts of children instead.
Young Brianna states: "I am sorry for what I have done. I love music and don't want to hurt the artists I love."
Now that her mother has had $2000 extorted from her over something that was an honest misunderstanding of the situation, do you really think she'll be purchasing vast quantities of music in the future? Perhaps youth will allow her to forgive, but having seen this level of immaturity on the part of the RIAA coming from miles away, you can be certain that I will not just let it go. As far as I'm concerned, this is quite malicious in nature, and given the total disregard for the age of the target and willingness to accept any amount of money at all from her mother is infuriating.

Quick to respond,
Sherman retorts: "Yes, there are going to be some kids caught in this, but you'd be surprised at how many adults are engaged in this activity."
WTF?? So Sherman justifies going after children because there's a high number of adults "engaged in this activity"?!? Sherman needs a very thorough background check done on him to see what he has done that has been "illegal" and then he needs to pay on that "activity" 10 fold!

/end rant

[Dante]

Here's a site to try and fight back the RIAA monster. It's only a petition but it's a start.

http://www.eff.org/share/petition/

[Kyraath]

http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2003-09-07-1.html

this article is an interesting read if you're bored. basically just some writing about how the industry is evil and blah blah same story. but still interesting :wink:

[Dante]

ahhh... Orson Scott Card. Excellent author. Columnist?? well.... speaking with authority of copyright law as a novel author and some incorrect facts aside, he has made some very good points. Alot of points that have been said before.

I'd like to add a little to that last paragraph:
First, most of the people who are getting those free MP3s would not be buying the CDs anyway. They're doing this in order to get far more music than they can actually afford. That means that if they weren't sharing MP3s online, they would simply have less music -- or share CDs hand to hand. It does not mean that they would have bought CDs to get the tunes they're downloading from Napster-like sharing schemes.
What about those same people who weren't going to buy the albums now have the ability to listen to a song and talk to their friends about it. Isn't that how things get sold? By friends telling other friends?

And what about cassette tapes? Same thing as VCR.

One of the facts he missed that I feel I need to mention is that artists don't normally get a percentage of the sale. Standard contracts dictate the the artist will get a lump sum, sometimes that sum isn't paid until after a certain number of albums have been sold. All the money you see flying around the *hot* artists is producers or marketing money. The money doesn't come out of the artists pocket, besides the exceptional few.

So a very large percentage, as Card states, go to the record companies.

[Kyraath]

I agree dante, back when i was actively using file sharing utilities, I purchased more cd's than i'd ever purchased before. And now that the tools have gotten stupid and full of addware and monitored by the spawn of evil, i've stopped filesharing and huh, i've stopped buying cd's also. I just have a hard time buying a cd when I've heard only 1 of the songs 1 or 2 times, but when I have several of the mp3s and i listen to them ALL the time, i completely prefer having an original copy of the music.