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The RIAA was given a victory October 4th when a jury awarded them $222,000 in a landmark case against a file sharing single mother, Jammie Thomas. As many have noted, the case was something of a perfect storm for the record industry, involving a long-standing username, one computer that could be matched to the offending IP address, and a technically savvy defendant. Still, the news is being touted as a victory for the industry in their misguided fight against music “pirates.”

The problem is, this equation doesn’t add up. Here’s how it’s supposed to work:

The music industry sues file sharers
The music industry wins its lawsuits
Something magical happens
People stop file sharing
Going from step one to step two is hard enough. The Thomas suit is one of the first clear victories in court the RIAA has had, after suffering numerous setbacks and settling many cases before trial. But it’s going from step two to step four that really doesn’t make sense. According to most statistics I can find, file sharing has only increased since the RIAA started treating its customers like criminals in 2003. Some sites put that increase at over 300%. Clearly, the “message” the RIAA was trying to send to file sharers isn’t getting through. In fact, despite high profile events like the Thomas case, you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to get sued by the record industry.


So, if these lawsuits fail to deter copyright infringement, surely they must be doing some good, right? Let’s run the numbers.

The record industry collectively pays the RIAA (most likely) millions of dollars per year. (The actual numbers are impossible to find, but they do have over a half million dollars in their lobbying budget, so their full operating budget must be pretty high.) The RIAA in turn pays its high priced lawyers an exorbitant amount to sue children, dead grannies, and college students, all people without a lot of money, shallow pockets as they say. Indeed, while it was once thought that the RIAA broke even on most of its lawsuits, they are actually losing quite a bit of money on each one.

But here’s the kicker: Even if the RIAA settles or wins a court judgement, even if the lawsuit isn’t thrown out of court for the frivolous piece of litigation it is, the artists who actually make the music that is being stolen don’t receive one thin dime back from the RIAA. That’s right, the artists who slave for years to make records, pour out their souls into their CDs, and enrich our lives in a myriad of ways don’t actually get any of the money recovered through these ridiculous lawsuits. Not one red cent.

Next time you wonder why CDs are $20, I think I have an answer for you. This system is broken. There is no reason to support the record industry by purchasing music. If you want to support artists, download their music for free and send them a crisp, new $5 bill. They’ll appreciate it a lot more, trust me.

Posted by J-Ro
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[Lots of links in the article]

Hello to all,

I'm new to this business and game so keep that in mind. I agree - $20 cd's are too expensive and aritsts signed with a label get little of it. However, having just completed my first full cd, I strongly disagree with the last couple of lines in this article. "If you want to support artists, download their music for free and send them a crisp, new $5 bill. They'll appreciate it a lot more, trust me." Well, yea, I'd rather have $5 than nothing if you're going to steal my music. If you want to show your appreciation, pay the full price for the cd! PAY for the music. I can't go to my studio and say, "Hey, everyone is going to steal my music and get it for free, so, can I have free studio time?" Doesn't work that way. Keep in mind, as I said, I am new to all of this but my cd is 100% independent, so I set the price at $14 for my new cd - signed, sealed, and delivered to anyone who requests it. I am honored to do it and it helps me recoup thousands of dollars I have spent on it, and allows me to produce more money. I hope to never need a label, but without a promotion team, I may get stuck making a deal with the devil. I hope not.

I may have said it before some years back, but I'll say it again: These lawsuits are little or nothing more than forced, confiscatory redistribution of wealth - with the poor and what the first President Bush called "brown people" (as Ms. Thomas appears to be), it seems, disproportionately bearing the brunt of this vindictive strategy - the motivation for which has to do with the RIAA's wanting it all, pure and simple.

Moreover, having lived in my youth in substandard housing, whereby greedy landlords and real estate developers considered those who lived in such housing to be subhuman animals (this was in the 1970's now), I see parallels/similarities in that sense to the RIAA's condescending, dehumanizing attitude.

There's another dynamic nobody seems to talk about, how the deck is so stacked in the favor of these rigid, radical ideologues: 1) By all appearances, the jury pool is rigged so that those who take issue with their steal-from-the-poor-and-take-for-themselves tactics are not even considered, and 2) In cases where no jury is involved, the RIAA shops such cases to judges who are more likely to agree with their "copyright-uber-alles" attitude.

Because contrary to the propaganda from the "government-media complex," it isn't really about music downloading or file-sharing - all those are "wedge" side issues that are part and parcel of the RIAA's main strategy: To work with their stooges in the executive, legislative and judicial branches on all levels (federal, state, local) to ultimately dismantle and completely eliminate whatever "fair use" provisions still exist in copyright law, so we have no freedoms whatsoever. And not too dissimilarly to al Qaeda or the Chinese Communist regime, the RIAA: a) is patient, and b) thinks over the long haul - or to put it another way, the "big picture." Though the means in their respective tacticologies are way different, the ends are similar: Complete subjugation and enslavement of us all to a rigid, unbending, doctrinaire ideology.