“RIAA members are excited about the potential of the internet and other communication technologies to provide an efficient means of distribution to music lovers globally. Regrettably, this potential remains largely unrealized—mired in a morass of piracy,” the letter addressed to the USTR reads.
Wow, these guys are lying through their teeth. You can now legally listen to music using an ever-increasing number of services services like iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, and Amazon. The large majority of the people I know use these services, along with CDs and FM radio, to listen to music. Only my most technically adept friends care to pirate music.
The point isn't whether those services are legal or not. The RIAA fails to accept the fact that the internet has made middlemen (gatekeepers) utterly obsolete. The internet doesn't "have the potential" to be a an efficient means of distributing digital data - it's the whole point of the net in the first place.
The RIAA wants the advantages of the net without having to deal with the consequences (namely, being obsolete), which is laughable, not to mention futile. I hope they'll be out of business soon so we can look back at their stupid whining in a few decades and heartily laugh at the faint memory of copyright while we freely access the shared knowledge, culture and information of mankind.
They remind me of AOL but at a bigger scale. They are trying to do everything they can to keep their ship from sinking. The fact that they seem like they could be successful is worrying.
When AOL started to shrink/die it started doing really shady things to keep users from switching internet providers [1]. One of the most insidious ones was how they would screw with a user's computer so that they would not be able to switch internet providers [2].
The fact that RIAA is trying to cripple the internet as a whole tells me that the beast is desperate and dying. It knows that its death is near and as a last bid for survival has gone for broke. If we can just keep it at bay for a few more years it will probably finally die.
Do they really think that blocking domain names will help stop piracy?
In my country torrent trackers aren't even the preferred way for pirating stuff. The preferred way is good old Direct Connect and hubs to which you connect to search for stuff are IP-based ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Connect_network
Either they are incompetents, or they know they'll abuse this for killing legitimate small businesses with disruptive business plans, or both.
Even The Pirate Bay hasn't run a tracker in years. They rely on DHT and Peer Exchange to find peers, and it seems to be working fine for them. All you need anymore is a magnet link with the hash of a file in it, and you can get the file without using DNS at all!
I remember someone once saying that the ideal scenario for the RIAA would be a kind of "Universal Jukebox" which would force customers to pay every time they want to hear a song. If you frame everything the RIAA does in terms of this, their statement actually makes sense.
What the RIAA wants is to make the internet a transmission medium and not an exchange medium. That's all they've ever wanted (except at first, when the figured they already had a perfectly good transmission medium and wished the internet would go away).
They'll work as hard as they can for as long as they can (or exist) to make this true. Nothing else done in service to this goal should come as surprise anymore.
This is hard, because I think that there are few sound recordings that are out of copyright and the way things have been going, I don't expect that to change any time soon.
That said, I wonder what one could manage if they could dig up a bunch of old public domain scores and start turning them into MIDIs or something. Actually, I thought I heard about some guy who was doing that, but with an actual orchestra. I wonder how that's going?
I feel strange when I read such posts. USA was supposed to be the poster child for freedom and liberty. It seems like that position has changed. As unfortunate as RIAA loosing millions of potential dollars is, its worse that the only country which supported all forms of freedom is now debating whether it should cut the viens of the free digital world or not.
I agree with your sentiment but this is really not a convincing argument. You could say the same thing about common thievery, don't worry about all those people stealing TVs from stores, that just means the people who would have bought those tvs will have more money to spend on other things!
That's a strawman. Theft involves actual loss for someone, and piracy - for the I-lost-count-after-the-first-three-hundred-and-sixty-four-thousand-times - is not theft, it's an infringement against a nonsensical law. All the RIAA and their clients are claiming is lost profits, which is major bullshit.
To pick your analogy, they are complaining that nobody is buying their TVs because a competitor building better and cheaper TVs has appeared, and demand that competitor be shut down to save their business model.
I wasn't defending antipiracy law, I was pointing out that the argument as written was completely wrong and pointless. You then say "BUT NO IT'S ACTUALLY DIFFERENT BECAUSE OF X" where reason X is completely not mentioned in the original post.
I guess I should have been more explicit; I agree with your conclusion but the argument was not the right and wouldn't convince anyone. It's like someone saying that Leprechauns aren't real because they know Lucky Charms commercials are CG; sure, but that's not why Leprechauns aren't real.
> To pick your analogy
Actually if you are going to say that, the analogy is that a competitor is building cheaper tvs that are otherwise exactly the same as your tvs, and they are already breaking the law to do so, but the law isn't really effective at stopping them from doing so. If you put it that way, it actually sounds awful.
It would be more like a competitor broke into their factory, stole the blueprints for their TVs, and then started to produce and sell the exact same models.
Of course, in your world, this 'theft' would be exactly the same as if they'd merely sneaked into the factory and stolen a blank piece of paper.
Sorry to be negative but could you please read some history books and figure out that the idea that the US is the poster child for freedom and liberty is just propaganda and rewriting history.
The people in the US believe in freedom but the government, military, foreign policy and bureaucracy have almost always been quite authoritarian. And I hope you can see that from the outside it's hard to see the people and easy to see the actions of the government.
RIP Internet. 1960 - 2011. Freedom had a good run. Please enter your credit card info to access this restricted webpage.
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Establishing ownership of the internet is quite a prize. I wonder how much it is worth? Probably wont be long until the big content makers slice and dice and monitize the
internet until it has a content payment plan delimited in links clicked and actions performed and content viewed/downloaded.
I'd be surprised if you suddenly got upfront charges for everything, stuff seems to be moving away from this.
A more likely conspiracy theory is that you access everything through some giant corporate proxy that is free at the point of use (which will not allow access to anything that goes against their corporate policy) but it will track every action you take on your computer and sell this data to anyone with a few $.
I'm no SOPA fan to say the least but is this a surprise? Of course they want to shut down torrent sites. That list was probably verbatim a list of people's "Torrent" folder in their browser's bookmarks.
The Internet should be free and there are many out there trying to limit the freedom we've come to enjoy and it really is a terrible thing. But let's get real here. These sites are total copyright infringers. There's no two ways about it. I admit I use them to get music and movies like the next guy but it's still not all kosher. They really are just trying to save their business which is looking more doomed each day. I almost feel like people who believe that the big corporations are trying to take freedom away are tinfoil hat sport conspiracy theorists. It's simple really. Online sharing is cutting hugely into profits so they want to stop it. They've found a way to do that but unfortunately that way has a lot of unintended side effects.
I'll probably be labelled an RIAA sympathizer but I'm really not. I'm like all of you. I want to keep the freedoms the Internet affords us. I'm just looking at this realistically. BitTorrent and p2p protocols have their legitimate uses but shutting down the outlets that give us access is the only way the RIAA sees they can stop piracy. It sucks.
If only the RIAA would invest as much time and energy into developing something that could make piracy obsolete or some process thats a better option for obtaining copyrighted material as they do in filing law suits and supporting SOPA we could keep the freedom. But let's not pretend that getting music and movies through torrent sites is on the up and up. It's one thing to share with your friends but this basically large scale black market distribution.
Big content providers need to be cut into tiny warring factions, not given executive power over what can and cant exist on their internet. Bust those trusts like Roosevelt did. Have riaa combat itself, not the fabric of the internet itself.
Wow, these guys are lying through their teeth. You can now legally listen to music using an ever-increasing number of services services like iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, and Amazon. The large majority of the people I know use these services, along with CDs and FM radio, to listen to music. Only my most technically adept friends care to pirate music.