View Full Version : RIAA Gone Wild

Lord Malakite
10-11-2007, 01:47 PM
Suddenly I feel like I'm in 1984 (http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=9218). The RIAA is going to extreme lengths.:cross-eye

El Chuxter
10-11-2007, 07:48 PM
Ridiculous. Instead of actually changing their business model, they fight tooth and nail to move it backwards.

I used to manage a small store. There was a CD player. Occasionally, myself or other employees would bring in CDs to play during the day. You know what it resulted in? People asking what the CDs were, and saying they were going to stop by a record store on the way home and buy them.

Instead of looking at it like the free marketing it is, they want to b**** about it being an unlicensed free performance. That may be the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

And where do you draw the line? If I get a song from iTunes and download it onto an MP3 player and burn it to CD for my car, they honestly think I stole the song, not once but twice? And if I play my stereo and my wife comes in the room, is that an illegal performance?

These 'tards are really grasping at straws now.

10-11-2007, 08:13 PM
In agreeance with El Chuxter I am, hmmmmmmmmmmmm

10-12-2007, 11:07 PM
Another way the music industry doesn't see how they're putting themselves out of business. Corporate stuffed shirts who contribute nothing are now scrambling to salvage their overpriced jobs while they still can before it all comes crashing down. Playing the radio in public is especially ridiculous, what next, suing people for whistling and humming in public?

10-16-2007, 04:13 PM
Guess what....Anarchy Burger Hold the Government Please.

10-16-2007, 04:42 PM
Incidentally, the nonsense in the article Ms. Pariser spews about "stealing" is directly contradicted by the Home Audio Recording Act, so, she can feel free to sue me at any time. the RIAA will lose, and I will win.

As far as publicly playing a recording, that is actually illegal, but give the RIAA enough legal rope and they will hang themselves. Really, at the bottom of it, is that record companies are in the business of recording, promoting, distributing, and selling record albums. The real money comes from sales, but the big service they give to artists is in distribution.

Once they are no longer needed to distribute albums (as the physical album is being marginalized), bands are going to start wondering why they are continuing to fork over the money.

Based on the cavalier attitude the industry has had toward its consumers, I am looking forward to the day the labels die.

10-16-2007, 05:08 PM
This feels like a really bad case od Demolition Man pansy assed rules and what not. Everyone in the media and certain groups are freaking pansies with their sensitivity crap. It'll be illegal to look at someone or exist before too long with the way things are going.

Mad Slanted Powers
10-16-2007, 11:14 PM
Back in 2002, I started listening to internet radio. I was listening to Indie Pop Rocks on somafm.com. I would just sit there and listen, and look up all these artists that I had never heard of before on allmusic.com. I eventually ended up buying a few CD's that I heard on there. After a couple of months of listening, the station (along all the other stations that were on somafm.com) had to shut down while the DMCA legislation was being hashed out in congress. This was an ad-free listener supported station, and the outrageous increase in royalties that they had to pay made it unaffordable to continue broadcasting. They returned to the air later that year when a settlement was reached where the fees didn't go up as much as originally planned. It was still a big increase though.

Most of the bands on that station won't get mainstream radio airplay, so anything that discourages stations like this means less opportunities for those artists to be heard. I'm not sure what sort of royalties regular radio stations pay, but I don't think it is as much as what they want from the internet stations. Heck, what about payola? People paying radio stations to play music! Now, you have internet stations like Indie Pop Rocks, or my station, or thousands of others out there willing to pay to broadcast. Most of these are just amateurs who want to share the music they are passionate about with whoever tunes in. I'm actually paying about $22 a month to Live365.com to do this, so I'm not making money on it.

When I was young, we used to tape songs off the radio, and make tape copies of albums and later CDs. The RIAA didn't seem to be doing any big search for illegal tape dubbers then.

10-17-2007, 11:50 AM

Yeah, we all did that, and while we were breaking the law, the reality is that dubbing and recording were nowhere near as easy to pull off back in those days. It is hard for folks now to even remember standing by while the countdown played with your finger on the pause button so you wouldn't miss the beginning of the song you wanted to lift off of the radio, or actually having to flip tapes and records as you recorded them in real time.

The advent of cd burners and downloading really is the industry's worst nightmare- high speed, high volume, high quality piracy. You cannot blame them for trying to preserve the old system, it made them fabulously rich.

Remember when the RIAA was all up in arms over used CD stores? The hubbub was all just an excuse to pump up the MSRP to 18.99. Yet another reason why the labels can bite me.

10-17-2007, 01:29 PM
What is unbelievable is that the RIAA thinks this is enforcable. Sure you can monitor the internet for illegal downloads thats a given, but how are you to stop people from pawning their CDs to used CD outlets or pawn shops?

I see a dark road ahead. Where CDs will be extinguished altogether and the only way that you can get music is through a network connection. If memory serves I remember there being a huge outcry against Sony when rumors abound that you could only play a purchased Sony game for the Playstation III and it would only run on that machine. My guess is that the technology was too expensive to put into an already expensive system. I think when the next generation of consoles are unleashed Sony will include such technology. Stands to reason since the broad in that article works for Sony BMG.

Radios as we know it will be a thing of the past. Everything will run wirelessly and I can even foresee there being a chip tied to the GPS that can determine where you are using the wireless radio and monitor whether you are playing it on your property. Think about it! There are already cell phones with GPS on it so you can keep track of your kids!

This is scary.

El Chuxter
10-17-2007, 01:41 PM
Sony BMG also included two different types of copy protection on CDs recently, and got in trouble for it. One would only allow you to play the CD on a computer using proprietary software (included). However, if you clicked "decline" when given the option, it still downloaded a sort of anti-driver that corrupted your machine and left it vulnerable to outside hackers. The other worked in a similar way, but didn't actually tell you it was doing so.