RIAA Paid Lawyers $16M to Recover $391k

[Etherton]

You should read it sometime; it's a pretty fascinating read.

Why? Glenn Beck tells me everything I need to know about it daily.. speaking of which...

 

[pothb]

agree 100%

the tax payers shouldn't be bailing out companies that can't figure out how to walk a straight line (GM and Chrysler for example). Can't turn a profit? Either figure out a new business plan, let someone else take the reins that can or close your doors. Don't put the Amercian tax payers on the hook for their incompetence

I do agree...

But I think a good, and possibly better (maybe anyway) is let the government do what it's doing, to bussiness that really can get out of their financial trouble, but when they do that, the government and taxpayers (gets a part profit, depends on how you look at it). So it's not like, we'll pull you out of the fire for nothing. It'll be more like I pulled you out of the fire, now stop me from drowning.

 

[TheCommander]

That is probably chump change for the RIAA.

 

[Parmenides]

Well we need to figure out how to reform the system to work for the people instead of the corporations.. If government was shrunken, but the only ones left are the ones that are corrupt, what's the point? Government is supposed to be the protector of the people's interest, not the lube for corporate ass-reaming.

If we're not careful, we'll have a government shrunken down at the behest of conglomerates that's so small the entire country would just be a wholly owned corporate subsidiary of Halliburton or something. If nationalization of everything is evil, well, I think the privatization of everything would be even worse.

That's not what smaller government means. Government can't grow so small that we need to rely upon Halliburton to maintain our military and police force. What I'm saying is that the RIAA's influence would be much smaller peanuts without government. RIAA lobbies, helps people get elected, and in return the RIAA gains more influence for its own agendas. If we returned to principles of small government, then congress wouldn't be pushing out so much garbage with special deals.

Since last election, lobby expenditure for businesses has increased. Lobbying is boring and less eventful when the elected officials are trying to cut the spending.

 

[Spewn]

Getting back to the original topic... The RIAA probably wrote it all off as a business expense, so the taxpayers paid for it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCZRqH7sRyA

 

[MrWizard6600]

In music, exposureurchase ratio is uncommonly low, probably the lowest form in media (depending of course on how you want to count advertisement as purchase). Certainly there might be some correlation to a revenue increase by bringing down TBP (btw, RIAA has contracted "media shield"'s services... what is media shield you ask? A DDOS bot net, RIAA regularly DDOS's torrent tracking servers. Its worse then the fucking wild west), but I cant imagine its anything significant.

In my own recent experience: I heard a podcaster by the name of Ryan Davis mention the new chemical brothers album on his show. I went off to the pirate bay (TBP) and downloaded the album that same minute. I listened to a few songs, hated it, and now it sits as the latest album edition to my music collection where it will sit occasionally being listened to when shuffle decides to pick it up. Will I buy that album now that I've listened to it illegally? Not a chance. Would I have picked up that album had I not had the chance to listen to it illegally? Maybe? I donno, I think probably not.

That "probably not" is what the RIAA seems to be leveraging in these insane "send a message!" lawsuits. "Probably not" means given a big enough sample size of people in the same situation, a few of them are going to buy said album. So the recording industry gains a few album sales (and further disgruntles their customer base).

Whats happening to the music industry is text-book industrial paradigm shift growing pains. This industry has been given mass room for expansion. iTunes is now selling more music (by volume and by profit) than every single music outlet store combine fifteen years ago, and I'd imagine TBP is moving more music than every possible legitimate music outlet, digital download or otherwise, combine. Its tough as an executive to look at that as anything other than a problem.

 

[MrWizard6600]

god damn face... thats supposed to be exposure: purchase ratio.,

 

[beowulf7]

Brilliant!

 

[NahBrah]

So you know there's this thing called the "Constitution" and in it it talks about these other things called "separation of powers".

You should read it sometime; it's a pretty fascinating read.

If you had actually read my post you would have seen the context that included the lack of oversight of the MMS and how it got to cartoonishly levels of corruption because it was not being monitored and how that is what I was referring to about non-unified government and was not talking at all about the issue of separation of powers.

I hope this helps.

Yes, with history as our guide, all the governments that were centralized fared much better.

Bahahhhahahhaaa.





...Of course you already knew that, you mentioned Cheney after all. It was the GOP that controlled both the White House and Congress from 2003-2007. Oooops.

Yes, I know the GOP were especially cartoonishly corrupt during that time.

That's why we want smaller government. The smaller the system and the less power they have, the less bribery that goes on. If congress wouldn't be passing through so many bills, earmarks, and semi-monopolistic deals for every special interest group then big businesses would have to look elsewhere to do their scheming.

Hahaha. Yes, small government to stop business corruption!

That's not what smaller government means. Government can't grow so small that we need to rely upon Halliburton to maintain our military and police force. What I'm saying is that the RIAA's influence would be much smaller peanuts without government. RIAA lobbies, helps people get elected, and in return the RIAA gains more influence for its own agendas. If we returned to principles of small government, then congress wouldn't be pushing out so much garbage with special deals.

Since last election, lobby expenditure for businesses has increased. Lobbying is boring and less eventful when the elected officials are trying to cut the spending.

You are arguing with vague concepts that have no actual basis in reality. What you want is laws to stem these corrupt influences, not smaller government. Which will never happen when the supreme court does atrocious shit like say corporations can give unlimited funding to campaigns which literally ensures the future of the country is completely fucked.

 

[WaltC]

Well at that rate they'll eventually go bankrupt. Unfortunately, that isn't going to be soon enough.

Probably no chance of the RIAA independently going broke, sad to say. Reason is that the Recording Industry Association of America is not a group concerned with profits and losses--they don't sell anything themselves--their only job is to represent the recording labels around the world in various ways. A generation ago the RIAA was purely a publicity group hired and formed by the record companies to do national and international publicity aimed at getting people to buy more music, just as you'll see the dairy farmers of America banding together to pay for national ads encouraging people to "Drink Milk," and that sort of thing. As we all know, in recent years the RIAA has been directed by its bosses, the recording companies, to approach the matter differently, as in suing people in the hopes of getting them to buy more music... Obviously, it isn't working out that way. How utterly unsurprising.

Here's the thing, though. Being as the RIAA is a group separate from the recording companies, and yet fully funded by them each and every year, the RIAA has obviously developed an abiding interest in its own preservation and expansion, regardless of whether the outcome of its practices financially benefits its financial donors, the recording companies themselves. Basically, the recording companies are ready and willing to believe the RIAA statistics relating to how much money the recording companies are losing each year to piracy. You know, the "$60B a year" and counting that the RIAA has been telling the recording companies they are losing through casual piracy via the Internet. The recording companies want to believe these numbers and so they keep on funding the RIAA's efforts at suing the recording company's customers.

From there it's a short distance to the RIAA telling the recording labels, "Hey, spending $16M to recoup $1.3M may not sound like good business, but it is! It's good business because we estimate the publicity from only the suits we've filed in the last year alone has cut piracy by at least $1B, and so by our numbers you guys are way ahead of where you'd be if not for our aggressive tactics!" The recording companies want to believe this, too, and so they keep flooding the RIAA with the money it needs to keep suing their own customers... It's crazy.

I think what's happened is that some law firms and many of the RIAA employees have figured out what saps the recording companies are, and how easy it is to con them out of the millions of $ a year they earn in legal fees. It's a gravy train and these guys don't want to get off--can't blame them in that regard.

It's the recording companies themselves who are too stupid to pull the plug on an RIAA run amok and spend the money on finding new talent and selling their customers the music they'd like to hear. Until the basic mentality of the recording companies changes in this regard, the RIAA is going to continue to have a field day with them at their expense. Maybe one day they'll wake up and understand the scam these law firms and many RIAA employees have colluded on in order to relieve them of millions of dollars. Maybe...I'm frankly surprised it's gone on this long--has to be one of the most effective, longest-lasting scams I've ever heard about.

 

[dr.kevin]

16 mill = 1.6 million albums.

chump change

they can get all of that back from Eminem

 

[gesicht]

i wish police type systems and even police districts should be accountable for their failure.

why is that every other company on earth has to make money yet these guys can spend 40x more then they are worth. if i hired someone to fix a 1$ hole and they charged me 40$ i would fire them.

this is like the war on drugs, it is a failure because they never learn they keep throwing more and more bad ideas at a problem. we spend billions and it is worse then ever. when something fails for this long it is time to do something new.

 

[WaltC]

16 mill = 1.6 million albums.

chump change

they can get all of that back from Eminem

Maybe, but if $16M is chump change, then what is suing somebody for between $3,900 and $7,500 amount to? Microscopic chump change--so why should they bother? None of it really makes any sense until you look at the estimated statistics the RIAA and its associated law firms are selling the recording labels as to how much money they are bleeding because of casual Internet piracy--those numbers are entirely imaginary, we know, but the recording companies haven't figured it out yet. That's the fiction that seems to be the prime motivator for the recording companies in this case.

 

[Gorankar]

The lawsuits are just to shock and instill fear I think. I also think they are prolly making enough off of the people they send threatening letters demanding payment to offset what they spend on the lawsuits, and then some.

To be a successful racketeer, you have to break a few legs so that your threats will actually scare your victims enough to pay you.