RIAA to go after individual media downloaders very shortly - Is this wise?

Great Debates
21

Not that I think downloading is the right target for the RIAA (they should embrace the technology like iTunes) but I think this strategy could work, and here’s why. By targeting the suppliers of free music, they attack the only group that has NOTHING to gain from the risk. Putting your MP3’s up on the net has exactly zero benefit to you, but you expose yourself to risk. Before this, the risk of getting in trouble was also zero, so nobody thought twice about opening their collection to the net. In addition, they do not have to prove you have an illegal copy, they only need to prove that you made illegal copies available, and that isn’t too difficult.

As a supplier of these files, the entirety of the internet must be able to find your PC and request the file from it. Perhaps there are anonymizers out there to protect you, but still, why bother? You will be earning $0.00 by going through all this trouble, and the only beneficiaries are a bunch of random internet users who won’t get in trouble.

Targeting the downloaders is a losing proposition, they have something to gain from taking risk, namely the free music. You’d have to raise the risk to outrageous levels to make a dent in that population.

It may be that the risk is considered negligible by the population and it won’t work, but I think this is their best idea so far.

22

I guess it kind of worked for me because as soon as I read it yesterday I immediately went and uninstalled Kazaa on my computer and my parent’s computer. I have already been warned once though from Sony for sharing a CD before it came out on imesh. I didn’t want to take another chance being that I would be a “repeat offender.”

In fact, I have the letter that I faxed them right here:

I had to fax a signed copy of this to them or I could be taken to court and would not have my DSL turned on again.

I don’t think it will stop anyone else form doing it though.

23

The genie is out of the bottle. The RIAA is setting up a challenge they will lose. Remember, p2p technology is easy to use. People were swapping files on the IRC long before Napster.

Can you say VPN?
:smack:

24

Screw the RIAA. The musicians stand to gain so much from the open sharing of music among fans and potential fans, and the dinosaur that is the recording industry can kiss my ass and theirs.

There are several bands that I am completely fanatical about. The way this usually happens is that I hear something about a band, or see that they’re playing someplace that I frequently go to hear music. I go online and download a few of their songs. Sometimes I really, really like what I hear, and I go hear them play. They just sold a concert ticket or boosted the amound of cover they brought in for the bar, meaning they’ll be booked again. If I like what I hear there, I will end up purchasing several CD’s and attending multiple concerts. If there wasn’t file-sharing out there, there would be no possibility for this kind of instant awareness of a band that doesn’t have the big industry bucks behind their advertising.

EVERY LAST ONE of my favorite bands, the ones whose shows I will always see, the ones whose t-shirts and CD’s I buy, I learned about through file-sharing. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to music in this country. You don’t have to be a “safe bet” for a recording exec who controls the advertising bucks in order to get exposure around the world. All you have to do is be good. That may be a threat to the vampires who use music as a moneymaking scheme, ripping off their artists, squashing creativity when it deviates from the formula, and soaking the consumers of music in the end, but if so, I couldn’t be happier.

I am currently sharing 2,051 files, and I couldn’t be prouder. Every single one of those is a ringing endorsement of an artist, and a presentation of their work to someone who wouldn’t have otherwise heard it. When I talk about my favorite bands to friends who don’t know them, I get the expected response of “Yeah, great.” When I hand them a copied CD, they listen, and more often than not become fans themselves.

I believe in going out and buying the latest album from my favorites - the quality is vastly superior, and it’s a pain to download all the songs from an album off the web, but mostly it’s just right to support the people whose art you appreciate. I just don’t feel bad about giving a copy to someone who would never have bought it anyway, and who, because of the exposure the pirated music gives the band, will run out and snap up the next one. I think that among bands that are doing something different, interesting and new, file-sharing sells a huge amount more than it loses. I doubt it’s good for the producers of uniform pop pablum, but if nobody’s buying Britney Spears any more, good for them.

LC

25

Bring it on!

Even if these heavy handed tactics do work against normal p2p, totally anonymous sharing is the next logical step. Any competition the RIAA can bring will only result in a more robust and non-traceable internet experience. So let them waste their time. Evolution is a good thing.

26

Ah, I love this board… (Though I’m still waiting for someone to drive-by with a “I hope they take down those little thieves for all their worth” comment)

I for one am unsettled by the idea that my ISP can be forced to hand over my personal information to the media industry on the basis of little more than allegation. We may be looking at a future where the sometimes hazy line between “fair use” and “piracy” (especially in the digital world) will be strictly policed by organisations like the RIAA.

That’s what I’m afraid of anyway, for what it’s worth I’m hoping that what most of you have been saying will come to pass.

27

I wouldnt be surprised if a few of the artists come out and say directly that they desire that their music be taken off of the list of copyright violations.

Many of these musicians owe their popularity/exposure to the file sharing programs in use today.

The ones that they have hit today have effectively been posting their songs on the internet… I’d find it extremely hard to believe that they will hit any users using Kazaa or Gnutella. Especially Morpheus. Morpheus is now completely anonymous… Besides using an IP trace, which is often fruitless due to the increasing amounts of home networks…

28

See, this is actually a perfect example of one of the ways in which our current economic system is flawed. Consumers have made it abundantly clear what they want. They want to be able to go on line and download a particular song at will. My WAG is that the vast majority of users would happily pay for the privilege to do so from a secure and robust server on demand. I sure would.

And yet, in spite of this, we have a group that is doing everything it its power to thwart consumer demand, rip them off and are being punitive about it as well. So much fo supply and demand, I guess.

29

AFAIK, the artists don’t own the copyright to their work, the label does. So if an artist says “I want to be distributed freely”, the label will just say “You can’t.”

UnuMondo

30

Thanks for the Freenet link, InquisitiveIdiot. For those who aren’t in the know, Freenet:

  • Is not quite a P2P application like Kazaa or Gnutella… it’s not a file sharing system, it’s a file storage system. There’s no Freenet search, but there are equivalents of Usenet (“Frost”) and web sites (“freesites”) which can be used to serve content.

  • Is encrypted. Every piece of content is identified by two keys: the one you paste into your browser, which lets you find and decrypt the file, and the one your Freenet node uses internally, which identifies the content but can’t be used to decrypt it. If you monitor the traffic between two nodes, you’ll have no idea what files they’re transferring or looking for.

  • Doesn’t exactly rely on sharing. Each node devotes a certain amount of disk space to a “store”, which is used to store Freenet content. Which content does it store? As a node operator, you don’t know (because it’s encrypted), you don’t care, and you have no control over it other than the size. The stores cache data that other people upload or request, so popular content will stay around in a lot of stores, and unpopular content will drop off the network. It’s impossible to remove a file from the network if people still want it.

  • Rewards good users and punishes bad users. If you have a bigger store, you can load common content faster, and download bigger files. If your node runs all the time, it’ll find content faster. OTOH, if you run a rogue node that gives bad responses to queries, other nodes will stop sending it queries.

  • Is more or less anonymous. Some nodes still know your IP address, but it’s impossible to prove that a query originated at any particular node, and it’s impossible to prove that a file is being served by any particular node. It’s also unlikely that the operator of a node has any knowledge of what data his node is storing or transmitting to other nodes.

Unfortunately, what you get in anonymity and unstoppability, you pay for in latency, reliability, and persistence. Broken links are everywhere, pages can take minutes to load, and uploading new content can take hours or even days. Still, if second generation P2P systems like Kazaa are compromised, people will head to more secure systems like Freenet.

31

I doubt anyone ‘likes’ the RIAA, it is their job to do something to curb the rampant theft of IP that is going on; The gov’t sure as hell isn’t doing anything. There are many services that sell music online (Yes, there is music online outside of Kazaa or Gnutella). Unfortunately for the recording industry, people seem to think that they have some sort of ‘right’ to free music, courtesy of the recording industries.

I don’t see lawsuits as a very efficient solution to the problem, but what other tools does the RIAA have?

32

I haven’t noticed any distinct liberal/conservative position on file-sharing, copyright infringement, or intellectual property in general. I don’t think this is a liberal/conservative issue at all. Liberals might in principle be against some of the more invasive practices the RIAA has contemplated to catch file-sharers, but liberals are also aware that the main “victims” of this are the entertainment industry, a solidly liberal group of people and big Democratic Party donors. And while conservatives might have no problem with a little invasion of privacy, the social-conservatives are certainly no friend of the entertainment industry, which they constantly attack as being amoral villians corrupting America’s youth.

33

Note: This is friend of mine posting and obviously he isn’t sharing the same sensibilities as most of us here.

Please, most of you have no clue what you are talking about. Sorry but that’s the truth. The RIAA does lose money to piracy we just don’t see all the figures.

Do I agree with what they are doing? As of right now they don’t really have any other choice. I believe that they could have handled this whole thing a lot better from the start but there’s not much they can really do right now.

I dare anyone here to come up with an actual arguement (hopefully something better than)

“I download teh music from the internet and you are mean if you tell me not to! I hope you go away you mean RIAA.”

Anyone who believes that piracey doesn’t effect the sales of any industry that’s targeted by it is a moron. The only exception is maybe the MPAA when movie piracy first started and we were all watching hidden camera videos of star wars.

34

I heard this threat from RIAA when there was scour.net, and they got nowhere. I heard it when there was Napster, and they got nowhere. I’m hearing it again, and again I think they’re going to get nowhere.

There are too many ways to get files of all types around the world via computer. There’s FTP, there’s IRC with the DCC and XDCC ability, and nearly every instant messaging software allows the transfer of files. There are CD and DVD burners that make exact perfect flawless copies in as little as 5 minutes.

As for why RIAA has lost my money, and probably why it’s lost the money of millions of other people, it has nothing to do with piracy. It has to do with the fact that RIAA is a monopolistic parasite that artificially inflates the price of a worse than mediocre product to ridiculous levels and arrogantly believes it can get away with that forever. RIAA stopped getting my money long before the first peer-to-peer file sharing program showed up, and they have only themselves and their greed to blame for it. Filesharing or not, I refuse to line RIAA’s pockets. My money goes to indie bands on indie lables with no ties to RIAA for CDs and concert tickets, bands I heard of entirely because the bands themselves put mp3s and oggs out there for people to listen to.

Their scare tactic failed at least twice in the past, and it will fail again. Maybe RIAA will get a few people, but millions more will never be caught, and paying the inflated prices to RIAA only to have them do absolutely nothing that pleases their customer base will look like a worse and worse idea to the people who mostly comprise the computer geek set - the same 16 to 30 year olds whose money RIAA wants. The more threats RIAA makes, the more those hard-core geeks in their darkened rooms (and there are a lot of those) will have it in for RIAA. Scour was replaced in less than a day. Napster was replaced in less than a day. Kazaa can be replaced in less than a day. RIAA’s current actions are guaranteed to make geeks more determined to continue filesharing.

35

Correction: We don’t see any figures. Why not? How hard is it to put up some statistics, some graphs, something, anything, to illustrate how filesharing has truly hurt RIAA? I don’t understand.

36

Horseshit.

Horseshit.

Horseshit.
^ Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie. Everything they do is available for download, that’s how people know of them. They hardly seem ‘hurt’ by the publicity.

Friend of asahiJpx, I eagerly await your elegantly worded reply.

37

**

Actually I dare you to come up with an “actual” argument. You know, one that’s based on figures we can see and interpret instead of having the gist spoonfed to us. Then again we are all “morons” who have “no idea what we are talking about” so why should you deign to come out from under your bridge? I don’t blame you, it’s so much easier to just assume that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong.

38

A technical question for the gurus out there. Given the following conditions, is it possible to have truly anonymous P2P sharing on a large scale like we see with Kazaa:

  1. Files have to be labeled and searchable under the song title
  2. The files (yours or not) have to be stored locally on your drive
  3. Anyone with an internet connection and software (within reason) must be able to request and download the song
  4. ISPs will be willing to work with authorities to identify users who violate copyright

I’m thinking that the ability of random internet users to request and download the song from your personal computer is going to also make you trackable, but that’s just from my non-expert opinion.

39

The question of whether or not the recording industry is losing money is moot – the bottom line is, distribution of copyright works without authorization is illegal. Ergo, the RIAA has the legal right to go after the folks doing the distributing.

As for whether it makes sense from a “customer relationship” standpoint… well, heck, you can always whistle.

40

Frankly, if we want to stick it to the RIAA cesspool and still maintain the moral high ground we should go ahead and download what we want and mail the artist however much money they would have gotten into their pockets from the sale thus compensating the artist while depriving the RIAA.