Will the RIAA die in ‘08? Music studios sick of paying legal bills to do a Scrooge act on customers — even a 12-year-old girl in public housing?
The RIAA is NOT suing a music-lover who ripped from legally purchased CDs. Yep, this outfit is Scrooge Central, but the earlier reports were wrong, according to Engadget. I’ll do a second tweak and point to the last paragraphs of a post by Google lawyer William Patry, who says the originals reports mangled the details.
Still, one wonders about an anti-ripping suit in the future, involving personal use. How that would in character! The classic RIAA downloading suit was against a 12-year-old girl in a public housing project, who had to fork over $2K and might have had to pay much more. The RIAA has yet to repent.
Eggnog-delicious news: Bad return on investment from terrorizing consumers
But wait. Could it be that the recording studios have toted up the numbers and discovered that crime—in the form of lawsuits against customers—doesn’t pay? Well, for a little holiday cheer, just check out this eggnog-delicious headline: EMI to cut RIAA funding. Also unhappy with the RIAA suits, both the legal and human kinds, seemingly, are Warner (dismayed that legal bills cut so heavily into profits) and Prince (taking the legal action in-house).
For further details, see Is 2008 to be RIAA’s death knell? (Stan Hodson’s blog, WinExtra) and The RIAA will die in 2008 (Mashable), as well as a Washington Post piece and a Slashdot discussion on the RIAA’s anti-ripping efforts.
The e-book angles
OK, gang. So what do you think? Lessons here for the e-book business? If you gonna have to sue customers by the thousands, isn’t it time to think about new business models? E-book piracy isn’t the biggest of problems now for major publishers, given that e-bookdom is so small, but that could change as the industry grows. Let’s hope books aren’t music redux.
Among the best protections against e-book piracy might be such measures as reasonably priced and flexible subscription plans and, ironically, avoidance of DRM—so as not to alienate legal purchases. No, e-book publishers shouldn’t rule out suits against big commercial pirates. Kill ‘em! But the RIAA’s sue-everyone approach is just plain crazy. People prefer to buy from warm-and-fuzzy companies, especially those without DRM. Perhaps that’s what EMI. Warner, Universal and Amazon’s MP3 store have concluded (now to persuade Amazon’s e-book arms!). PR-deaf, the RIAA has helped make its member studios some of the most hated conglomerates on the planet. No slouch in this department, the RIAA is itself the real champ.
December 30th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
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