People Starting to Fight Back against the RIAA
The RIAA sued Patti Santangelo two years ago, but when she fought back, they eventually dropped the suit–only to switch over to suing her 16-year-old son, Robert, and her daughter Michelle, 20. Michelle failed to show up in court and so lost by default, but Robert is fighting back–not only by fighting the claim, but also by filing a counter-claim saying that the RIAA damaged his reputation, distracted him from school and cost him legal fees. Further:
The papers allege that the companies, “ostensibly competitors in the recording industry, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and public policy” by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency “to make extortionate threats … to force defendants to pay.”
The RIAA responded publicly by issuing this statement:
The record industry has suffered enormously due to piracy. That includes thousands of layoffs. We must protect our rights. Nothing in a filing full of recycled charges that have gone nowhere in the past changes that fact.
Naturally, one can assume the claim is pure BS. As this blogger points out, the drop in sales was not due to piracy, it was due to the economy failing and the record labels simultaneously scaling back releases. The “thousands of layoffs,” if they ever really happened, were not connected to piracy, and the music industry itself was likely the most responsible for them.
In fact, when file-sharing began its meteoric rise, music sales were booming; this went on for a few years, in fact. The sales drop coincided with the aforementioned economic bust and the industry’s cutback in production, and there has been absolutely no correlation found between music sales and online piracy, according to this 2004 study reported in the New York Times.
So Robert Santangelo might have a strong case there. Go get ’em, kid.
Another factor that’s too-often forgotten when it comes to the drop in sales for the record companies is that they had been in a cycle of new format upgrades every so often… until everyone had CDs.
We went from vinyl records, to 8-track tapes, to cassette tapes, to CDs, all in the space of roughly 30ish years- from 1965 to 1995.
But by 1995, pretty much everyone was buying CDs. Remember how quickly they hit critical mass? I remember going to college in 1987 and being somewhat amazed at the guy who had over 100 CDs in his collection; by 1992 or so, CD players in cars were extremely common and cassette sales were plummeting.
What this meant, though, was that there was a lot of back-catalog sales. People duplicated their collections on the new format.
Once everyone had their music on CDs, they didn’t need to re-buy it. And this time, as the music industry has moved on to a new format- digital audio- they haven’t been able to resell everyone their music again, because now people have the tools to simply transfer their OWN music from their CDs to digital format.
Paul
Seattle, WA