Music file sharing took a massive hit yesterday when a federal jury awarded $222,000 to six record companies that sued a Minnesota woman for illegally sharing 24 songs. Yep, that's right ... 24 songs.
What's your reaction to this decision? Does peer-to-peer sharing violate copyright any more than burning a mix CD for your roommate? If you shared music in the past, do you worry that you'll be sued? Would you fight it or take the settlement? Do consumers have any recourse when the six biggest labels join forces to sue?
Friday, October 5, 2007
Recording Industry Hits the Jackpot
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5 comments:
Might be a good time to consider some of the proposed alternative social and economic models for music distribution in a networked age, such as the "voluntary collective licensing" model proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (and based on an existing scheme to make sure that songwriters get paid when their music as "shared" freely over the radio).
To be honest, I think record companies are totally sick, and this disgusts me. Are music artists and songwriters getting the benefits of the settlement? No. Do music artists and songwriters get the benefits of selling lots of music over getting their music out by file-sharing? Not usually.
The way the RIAA is going about these lawsuits is really poor, but in this particular case the woman wouldn't even sit down and talk with them, and the jury awarded them the money that they deserved according to the law. Had she just been willing to negotiate she would have paid a much much smaller penalty.
Yeah, I agree the RIAA is doing this in a rotten way. The part I find interesting is that they say they're doing it to spread awareness for the consequences of illegal downloading. And they also say, it has helped and they believe the rate of illegal downloading is declining. So, do they want media to cover this big lawsuit here, and also small pre-litigation letter waves sent to a targeted college population, as a way of promotion? The fact that they offer much reduced discount rates for the user at first shows it might not be all about the money.
It's also interesting how here at UW, the RIAA can just call up DoIT and have an employee take hours to retrieve all sorts of information they need about an illegal downloader/sharer using a campus network. This is exhausting and unpaid. It’s causing more than a headache for the users-- it's actually losing money for the UW. Funny how the RIAA put a bill in front of Congress saying crackdowns will help cleanup university networks; while DoIt says the illegal files have pretty much no effect on the network.
This is disgusting if you ask me. Even if it was "stealing"--which I don't think it is--what are they stealing? Cars? Houses? I dont know about you, but I've never seen a $222,000 CD. Even 24 CD's, if each song had come from a different CD, wouldn't come close being worth as much as the record companies are demanding. They are clearly just making an example of her, but picking off random people will never have the effect they are hoping for. It will only breed resentment which will coexist with continued downloading.
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