RIAA honcho Bainwol, has three children and no sympathy
Techdirt: RIAA Suggests MIT Student Drop Out Of School To Pay Fine –This shows you exactly how depraved these creeps are. Pathetic. Inexcuseable.
Plenty of people have done the math and suggested that this little business of suing their biggest fans has turned into a nice little profit center for the industry. Digg is pointing to the case of one woman, a student at MIT, who is trying to talk to the RIAA after being offered just such a settlement. When she points out that she’s a poor college student, the RIAA rep kindly suggests that perhaps dropping out of school will make it easier to pay off the fine.
Unbelievable! How can RIAA suggest such a thing? First, do they have absolutely sure she did the uploading? Second, I think it’s more than proven that people who use peer-to-peer, when they like the music, they end up buying it! And that the lack of profit from the industry doesn’t come from that… So, what are they thinking? And how is the media dealing with this on the States?
Luis Ramos
Portugal
If you’re going to blame someone, blame legislators for making the laws and courts for interpretation. I’m at the age I hardly ever buy CD’s, and I rent movies. The younger people that do buy them should become more politically active and just stop buying the crap. That’s the best way to send the vultures a message. You’ve got to hit a corporations profits to hurt it. To change intellectual property laws will take years, particularly with lobbyist and tons industry hired legal guns roaming freely within the beltway.
This reminds me of how the Police have turned the drug war into a nice little profit center for their departments.When they confiscate so called assests purchased with drug profits.Both cops and the evil RIAA should not profit from what they are doing because it corrupts the whole organization.
Not to defend the RIAA, but if you commit a crime, you don’t necessarily get to choose when or how to your fulfill punishment. The laws need to be changed, but this is not a good angle from which to attack the problem.
This might be a stretch, but since MIT is in the Boston area, and there are are a few Law Schools around Boston, can’t some Legal Aid Clinic help her out? I would like to see a few of these cases taken to court. When a jury hears what the actual costs of the recording are, what the artist earns, and what the RIAA wants as extortion, they won’t convict. Or, at worst, they will find her guilty but make her pay the actual damages.
In a case like this, as soon as the RIAA pulls out their claim that they have lost so much money to illegal D/Ls, they can be challenged to prove the math. I understand that there are more then a few bright minds around MIT that could punch holes in the RIAA’s theories. After there have been some challenges, the RIAA might find it cheaper to change tactics.
Just an idea.
Remember — it’s creeps like the RIAA who own our politicians and legislatures. Follow the money.
These are not criminal cases, they are civil cases. The RIAA’s cases are too weak for any government attorney to want to prosecute as criminal cases. As civil cases, a judge can decide whether payment terms are appropriate.
ECA:
“We just figured it cost $3-5 to get it to the shop…the REST is profit.”
Your economics lesson is somewhat misguided. First off, not every CD is sold. Exactly meeting demand is rare, if not impossible. Second, what about promotion and advertisements? What about royalties to the songwriters? What about profits for the store?
I am a HUGE purchaser of CD’s (I have over 6000), and I agree that $18 or so as the retail price (usually discounted to $13->$16) is too much, and the right price point should be around $10->$12 a CD to the consumer.
But to believe that the record companies are making money hand over fist is just plain wrong. Do some “stars” get too much $$$, limos, etc.? Sure. Do some executives get paid too much? Sure. But no different than every other industry in America.
Dan, you’re way off base if you are compairing drug forfeitures to this. The reason they do that is to send a message that selling drugs does not pay and if you do you will lose all that it payed for. Also remember that selling drugs is a criminal act. I imagine you are either a casual drug user yourself or have had some run ins with the police, or you wouldn’t have even brought this up.
Lou, you forgot the cost of mastering the CD, recording the CD (in studio), all the mouths that have to be fed along the way to the point of actually having a product to master a CD for.
Lou, you forgot the cost of mastering the CD, recording the CD (in studio), all the mouths that have to be fed along the way to the point of actually having a product to master a CD for.
ECA’s estimates were way to simplistic. It’s one of the things that really bug me about the justification for stealing something. “It doesn’t cost XYZZY company anything to make XYZZY Widget, so why should I have to pay for it.” Look at MS Office as an example. It’s a product that costs over $1000 for the enterprise version. Yet, the cost of the CD’s that they are on is next to nothing. MS must be making a monstrous profit. Not exactly. Just consider the amount of man hours needed to develop such a product. Now factor in the salaries for those men and women. That’s just one small piece of the puzzle for the cost of Office.
Sure, OpenOffice is free and there were probably just as many man hours put into that product. True, and to be perfectly honest, I can’t for the life of me understand how Open Source software survives. I certainly don’t have the time to devote to developing a piece of software that won’t put dinner on my table or help keep a roof over my head. I really can’t understand how others do it.
All that said, the RIAA are full of bull-pucky and need to be dissolved immediately. Musicians need to get together and form a new organization that has ABSOLUTLY NO MBA’s, or if the do have MBA’s, they are given a small percentage of the profits of sales and the musicians keep the rest.
It amazes me in this day and age, with all the forms of free promotion out there, that the RIAA still has the number of clients that it has still.
“It’s one of the things that really bug me about the justification for stealing something. “
God, I have to say this every time the topic of the RIAA comes up:
INFRINGING COPYRIGHTS IS NOT STEALING!
When you steal something you deprive the owner all use and rights associated with it. When you infringe, the copyright hold still has full rights to continue selling, leasing, using the music, movie, etc.
I’m not saying that infringing is legal, of course it’s illegal. But to equate it with stealing is nonsense and completely misstates the law. The US supreme court in DOWLING v. UNITED STATES, 473 U.S. 207 (1985) determined that infringing is not stealing.
***CORRECTION****
Dave —
>>>Look at MS Office as an example. It’s a product that costs over $1000 for the enterprise version. Yet, the cost of the CD’s that they are on is next to nothing. MS must be making a monstrous profit. Not exactly. Just consider the amount of man hours needed to develop such a product. Now factor in the salaries for those men and women. That’s just one small piece of the puzzle for the cost of Office.
MS must be making a monstrous profit.
It’s common knowledge that MS makes 85% profit margins on Office and 80% on Windows. In comparison, retailers are lucky to make about 4%.
What about royalties to the songwriters? What about profits for the store?
Off Topic, but that is one of the things that bothers me about the RIAA’s claims of lost sales – they appear to be calculating the losses based on MSRP of the CD, when “the Industry” only receives a fraction of that.
I think someone should defend themselves by calculating losses based on the 99c-per-song rate of iTunes, and $9.99-per-“album” – not the RIAA’s math of one song equals the MSRP of the entire CD it came from.
i.e.
If I uploaded 100 songs, I owe them 100 x 0.99 = $99.00 , versus the RIAA making that 100 X $18 = $1800.00
If I uploaded 10,000 songs then I owe them $9,900.00, vice $180,000.00
If I uploaded 100 songs, I owe them 100 x 0.99 = $99.00 , versus the RIAA making that 100 X $18 = $1800.00
Cripes, even that is giving the RIAA money that would otherwise go to Apple or the artists – I would offer then 75-cents per song… 🙂
We just figured it cost $3-5 to get it to the shop…the REST is profit.
Here is another view of that:
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/entertainment/0101/cd.price/frameset.exclude.html
I love the assumptions in a graph like that – discounts to retailers is different than advertising and promotion. And all artists get the same amount spent on promotion, don’t they?? 😉
Retailers often have a huge markup on CDs.
While working at one I foudn the per-CD cost of even the most expensive was rarely more than 10 GBP… and most were around 8. Less for big titles. Those would then be sold for 14-16.
Think about Jiffy Lube.
I can have 5 guys changeing oil in 10 minutes per car.
I charge $20 per car.
About $1200 per hour during rush hour, and with
5 people PAID $35
Bulk oil
SN
You are very correct about the difference between stealing and copyright infringement.
Unfortunately, for us simple minded laypeople, THEFT is one syllable, STEALING is two syllables, and COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT is six syllables. Would you really want us to get all tongue tied repeatedly saying COPYRIGHT INFRINGMENT? Think of your readers !!!
And may the Flying Spaghetti Monster have mercy on your pasta.
“You are very correct about the difference between stealing and copyright infringement.”
You’re talking as if the difference between infringement and theft is one of pure semantics. That’s not true. As I’ve already showed above they are entirely different concepts.
“Rape” only has one syllable, so why not refer to P2P use as rape?! “Murder” has only two, why not call sharing music murder?!
Brilliant … Drop out of MIT, which you need to be pretty smart to get into in the first place, and have good job prospects afterward … to pay a stupid fine (slower prolly – someone did say she’d be able to pay it back quicker after grad …)
This MIT student apparently has NO COMMON SENSE. Most people aren’t aware that she wrote HOW to avoid getting caught by RIAA then does the activity she writes NOT to do…
She writes in her blog, “Last fall I wrote an opinion piece on music piracy (How to Avoid Getting RIAAed, Oct. 21, 2005)”
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V126/N13/RIAA1306.html
And then promptly goes back to HOSTING 272 pirated files on a P2P application (Kazaa, whatever). Slow learner or what? I don’t feel a bit sorry for her.
Well, there are plenty of bright minds at the MIT.
The problem is that they are bright in their field only. Anything else and they’re like mud wasps, programmed to excel in one thing but the rest eh…
Maybe the riaa should instead monitor someone doing the hosting, then charge them for copyright infringement on a per download basis.
You keep saying they haven’t lost that much money. Part of the reason is because of their own actions to prevent the losses. If I understand your arguments, you would like it to be perfectly legal to copy a CD, and to distribute the files online. The only bottleneck would be the download speed. Why would people pay money if they can get them for free? Charging just $1 helps reduce the demand for illegal downloading, but do you really expect them to charge just $1 for movies? Arfen’t you at all concerned about the effectg this will have on music and movies? We’ll get nothing but songs about McDonalds and Pepsi.
And what are the major costs??
IF you dont know, its Adverting, and shipping/distribution…
Its not the weight of the package, its the BULK..that costs so much..
And if they can DROP the shipping cost, thats about 1/2 the costs at least…. Then take the adverts fro Kmart, costco, walmart, and the rest to advert (they get paid back for it) and you have killed about 80% of the costs….
Then you also dont have the profit margins to contend with and whats MADE is the accual costs…
So we dont have profits from distribution
No costs from store profit
No costs from shipping..
Np packaging or artwork or packaging or RFID.
How much is left…
The problem is that there no one nearly as powerfull as the RIAA to stand up against them in court. What is need is a legal precedent showing that the loss to RIAA due to an unauthorized download is only equivalent to the profit on a legal download.
Quite simply, CDs sell at retail for 15-20 times what a download of a single song goes for. The additional stuff in the retail CD is obviously what makes up the difference. The unauthorized download does not include the physical storage media, other songs on the disk, plus the artwork and case – therefore it is not the a comparable product to compute RIAA’s loss on.
Can’t someone demonstrate that in court and then all this exploitation of the ordinary music mavens can stop. Soon everyone will stop buying the CDs, because of authorized downloads and there will be no lost retail CD business to compare to anyway.