CNN reports this morning that261 music file swappers are sued but also that an amnesty program has been unveiled. The federal lawsuits and amnesty program are the latest moves by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in its fight against illegal music file trading on the Internet. According to them filesharing is responsible for a 31 percent drop in compact disc sales since mid-2000.
So what do you do? First they tried to put the companies out of business that were making programs to share (like Napster). They did succeed in that; most filesharing sites were using a central database with users and it was easy for the RIAA to take measures against that. But then they didn’t count on the ingenuity of programmers; they found a way that made it very difficult to track the people: peer-to-peer (read this article for an explanation of P2P networks).
But now they also declared war on P2P and they are – for the first time – trying to sue individuals. Off course they know that this is just scare tactics (it’s impossible to sue millions of downloaders); and it also is the kind of tactics that you’d expect from an industry that is corrupt and rotten! If you want to know more about the RIAA and the way they conduct themselves, I suggest you visit this website: mp3 is NOT a crime.org.
For instance, according to the article “CDs and the Scarcity Principal” the RIAA is making prices artificially high by both controlling distribution and production.
However the RIAA is really ridiculous when it comes to explaining what and how they do to track people.
For instance: the US media has bought the RIAA’s “ingenious” and “surprisingly technical” approach to identifying how to tell the difference between mp3 files which were obtained from legally purchased CDs and those which came from “pirated” sources.
What they say is this: “By comparing the fingerprints of music files on a person’s computer against its library, the RIAA believes it can determine in some cases whether someone recorded a song from a legally purchased CD or downloaded it from someone else over the Internet.”
Duh?
Since a digital copy of an mp3 is NOT a perfect copy of a CD track (in spite of what the industry has led so many to believe) once it’s been created and placed on the Internet, each recurring copy of this file WILL be an EXACT duplicate of the original mp3. If this were not true, the RIAA’s statement would fall apart at this point in the logic. If it were altered in any way, this entire wild theory about hashes and digital fingerprints would be quickly proven false.
I don’t want to be overly technical here, but ask yourself this: If the mp3 was not created from a legally purchased CD, where the hell DID it come from?
What can the origin of an mp3 file be if no one possessed the physical CD? Magic? It just appeared on their computer one day? They hacked into the recording studio’s computer? Broke into the studio in the dead of night and stole the master recordings?
If an mp3 was not created from a legally purchased CD, then there’s only one other possible source – the record label itself, if not the artist.
Do the $4 billion a year in free promotional copies have different digital fingerprints that the legal CDs? Can you tell a shoplifted CD from one which was legally purchased?
Unless the recording industry itself is responsible for creating mp3s from the master recordings and distributing them over the Internet, ALL mp3s MUST, by definition have come from purchased CDs. To entertain any other definition is really dumb.
Anyway: I could go on and on, but I suggest reading this funny analogy called:The MPAA, RIAA, and Fellatio.
And to all RIAA jokers out there: GO F* YOURSELF!!