Quote of the day
“There’s no way they’re ever going to get that”
- Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a 32-year-old mother of two, who has been found guilty of wilful copyright infringement and must pay $1.92m after a retrial in a US court, making her the first person to be successfully sued for illegal filesharing in the US. A court awarded the Recording Industry Association of America the increased amount after Jammie Thomas-Rasset was found guilty of wilfully violating the copyright of 24 songs. She was originally found guilty of copyright infringement in 2007 and was ordered to pay a total fine of $222,000. She was one of around 30,000 individuals to be fined by the RIAA, typically for amounts between $3,000 – $10,000, for illegal filesharing via peer-to-peer sites such as Kazaa, used by Thomas-Rasset. A new trial was ordered after the judge in her original case said he had “erred in giving the jury instruction”. Unfortunately for Thomas-Rasset, a new jury decided her crime warranted a much larger punishment, to the tune of $80,000 per song. (full story HERE)
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It’s not like they’re going to get 1.92m dollars is it?
They should put down the prices after they’ve made their initial money, people wouldn’t bother filesharing then!
You must be joking. This isn’t just about money for the record companies – it’s about their entire survival.
The amount seems vastly disproportionate- arbitrarily punitive rather than actually reflecting some reasonably calculated compensation for actual loss- but as a digital content creator myself (I draw rude comics for a living and sell them on the internets, and have been “pirated” myself a bit), I wrack my brains on this issue but can never come to a consistent and satisfying answer. I’m a libertarian in political terms and thus recognise copyright to be an artificial type of property right constructed by the state (I intensely dislike the idea of a seller maintaining “ownership” of a property after it has been sold at a gut level) but how else are creators to earn a fair living? If copyright is maintained, what is fair punishment for violation?
I do not like the idea of creative works being paid for by other revenue streams, as is often touted, such as advertising or, God forbid, some kind of levy. Once one is advertising supported, one’s customers are not readers or listeners, but advertisers, and there is a tendency to only produce mass appeal products, as TV demonstrates. The niche product is crowded out because the audience advertisers require (due to the very low financial return per eyeball) is far higher than the audience required to support a product by direct sales. The idea of paying creatives from levies is too awful to even contemplate.
So I always hope I’ll read some fascinating insightful solution somewhere on the internet. But I never have so far.
LFAT, to some extent i agree. However, like any business they have to adapt to new challenges and they haven’t been able to do this very successfully (primarily as they can’t control the internet).
Their preferred strategy is to pursue filesharers which hasn’t worked so, let’s move on and try something else…
And finally, I think it is about the money. The cost of an album on itunes (electronically locked) is broadly comparable to what you can order a CD for from online retailers….
……..record companies just have the hump that they don’t own the show from start to finish anymore……
LFAT, I’m a musician, and I am one of the people who should be shouting loudest for judgements like this.
Unfortunately, I find it very hard to get excited over these arguments about intellectual property rights or about the financial state of the record companies. I go into the studio next month, with the hope that the product I create will find favour with an audience, (and that I can find a distributer who will offer me better than 3% of 2% of 1% of F**k-all). But the record companies have spent the last 25 years devaluing the product they sell to a ridiculous degree.
When I was a kid, I would go to the store to buy a record. It would come in a gate-fold sleeve, with real artwork. It would have a form, so that heard in its entirety, it made sense. The last song on the first side had better be good, because you could listen to the record in the store, and if it didn’t make you want to turn over, you didn’t buy. CD was cheap to make, expensive to buy, but wasn’t much of a product, you didn’t have to respect it, (remember the Tomorrows World piece with the peanut butter?) Pop music was always disposable, but CD distinctly so.
MTV & X Factor has reduced music to a odd beauty contest, the singles market and the lack of foresight by record companies means that most albums are 3 or 4 singles plus filler. The album is now downloadable in individual songs, so that’s what happens, you buy the singles and discard the rest.
The record companies need to rethink their strategy and start to make an offer to the public that makes them want to buy, hold and own the hard copy, to collect it and listen for years. They went for the quick buck and shot themselves in the foot.