A Machine Gun to a Knife Fight
You can cut down a tree – a small tree, anyway – with a semi-automatic weapon. It’s a matter of patience, lots and lots of bullets, and little regard for the environment. For certain of WC’s politically conservative buddies, it must have some kind of internal gratification that offsets the waste of money and the consequences of pumping pounds of poisonous lead into the environment. But it’s not a very effective way of cutting down a tree.
But that’s what the Recording Industry Association of America – the RIAA – has been doing the last 4-5 years. They’ve spent tens of millions of dollars on lawyers, filing 35,000 plus lawsuits against folks who they accuse of swapping songs on-line. The RIAA has sued teenagers, dead folks, housewives, college students and small businesses. All because the RIAA was afraid that someone, somewhere might not be paying for a song.
As WC has said before, he’s all in favor of hiring lawyers, especially paying the lawyers you hire. But a little arithmetic might suggest that RIAA’s war on its customers doesn’t pencil out.
First, there’s the premise that someone who downloads a song illegally would have bought the song at full price. Since Bill Gates whined about folks pirating Microsoft BASIC back at the dawn of time (1976 in Computer Years), that premise has been doubtful. WC has never seen a statistically sound study that supports the premise. There’s some pretty good work that suggests there is no statistical correlation between folks who download songs and lost sales.
But if you get by that unproven assumption, there’s the second problem of cost effectiveness. WC would bet a designer coffee at River City Deli that the RIAA has spent far more on lawyers than its members have lost in sales to piracy.
Not to mention the collateral damage. There are 35,000 plus people who have likely sworn they will never, ever buy music from the recording industry again. And likely they have a significant number of friends who are similarly annoyed.
None of which will stop the RIAA from taking its arsenal of lawyers to the next tree, of course. A sensible industry might ask itself its distribution model was flawed. But anyone with common sense doesn’t try to cut down trees with a semi-automatic weapon.
Your point is well-taken.
Their campaign must be designed to simply create fear of being caught. Since when has the human race been stopped by that?
One only has to drive down a street, even one with cameras monitoring the car flow, to realize that there will always be people who will not be deterred by common sense, the law, or the fear of being caught.
Add to that the sense of anonymity that the internet creates – though we all know we are being traced, recorded, and monitored at some level, if only be advertisers – and any thinking person would realize that people are not going to feel the deterrent effect the RIAA thinks it is creating. Many will do it just to symbolically rebel, to give a cyber finger to the powers that be.
I believe recording artists and musicians should receive monetary benefit from the fruits of their talent and labor. However, corporate music itself doesn’t compensate them adequately – never has and never will. I think people understand that and don’t mind shorting a corporate that shorts its talent.
However, if the artists and musicians themselves were directly the ones offering their wares and the ones being directly hurt when someone pirates their wares, I think more people would think twice about ripping off their favorite singers or bands.
The distribution model is indeed flawed. It is based on a faceless, soulless corporation that few, if any, can identify with or care about.
kssunflower
November 9, 2010 at 9:13 am
Greetings WC -
I got all excited when you stared off talking about machine guns… They are somewhat overrated though. The youtube fodder on cutting down snowmen with a shotgun is far superior. And I’m sure they used steel shot, so that should make you feel better.
When it comes to the RIAA, ASCAP, BMI and (now) SESAC – I lump them all into one category, slightly more evolved than dog excrement, with similar moral standards. I still can’t believe no one has beat these scumbags on one simple issue. If a business plays a RADIO in their bar they have to pay ASCAP. The Radio Station ALREADY paid licensing fees to air the music. It doesn’t matter whether the person heard it in their car, on their ipod, or in a bar. The bar is no more ‘rebroadcasting’ the music than the car door speaker is.
SESAC (the European) music mafia sent shakedown letters to Alaskan ‘entertainment venues’ last year and followed up with threatening calls. The unbelievable gall of these people is beyond compare. Trolls, pure and simple.
mrderik
November 9, 2010 at 5:39 pm