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ED is Offline
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Posts: 638
Join Date: Apr 2003
   
Default 06-26-2003, 02:54 PM

Here's my post from another forum; it's more succint:


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In a story today, the RIAA has finally thrown that ultimate of gauntlets down on file sharers, and will now be personally going against the "major distributers" of P2P file-sharing. What does this mean? If you have a large deposit of music that you are sharing online, then you are going to be targeted for substantial lawsuits ranging up to 15000 a song.

To this I say - "Ha Ha - way to further shoot yourselves in the foot". The RIAA since day one has attempted to bully file-sharers and music users into accepting it's rules in regards to distributing and purchasing music. And now its telling those users who it WANTS to buy CD's that if they dont buy them the normal lucrative way, we will sue you into learning your lesson and buying our CD's. Yea. This has all the makings of a sure fire plan.

We all know the debate - it's stealing, its wrong, it takes money out of so-and-so's pockets. I agree with that. However, the RIAA has it's own self to blame. The average CD is now 17-18 bucks. CD's are NON Returnable. If you purchase a CD you think is cool, and it turns out that poppin single was the ONLY good song on the CD, you've just paid a cool 18 bucks for the pleasure of wearing out 3 minutes of music. Add to this the fact that most of the music released today is garbage, and you have a avery frustrated consumer that has no confidence in purchasing music the normal way, and taking that financial risk on whether or not something is going to be good.

So then you have NAPSTER, which during its heyday receives worldwide attention, and alerts the common man to the ability to share your favorite songs with other people. And of course the RIAA steps in and shuts that down. Does this stop file-sharing? Of course not. It empowers hundreds of programmers to create new, non-centralized music sharing that is easy to use, easy to navigate, and offers any song your heart could desire. So by killing it's "biggest foe", the RIAA creates dopplegangers, stronger and more powerful than its predecceser. Another great move.

So what we have is a large lobby group threatening your supposed consumer base, and challenging computer savvy folks out there to create better methods of hiding their online stashes (those that are in the know already have several options for this, and of course with Kazza being the most high-profile, it's this file sharing method that is being targeted).

This is a no-win situation for the RIAA and the recording industry. It'll win some battles and scare some folks away from file-sharing online. But in the long run, just another foolish move on their parts to further push them away from what the consumer wants..
  
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