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[dognapot]

so the riaa recently sued a few hundred more people. so i thought this might be a good intro to some riaa/file-sharing discussion. i've never had any sympathy for the riaa. to me, they're spoiled rich kids using thier influence to extort money and change the rules so they can ignore changing markets. that was just my first impression ages ago, but as time goes on it becomes apparent i struck on something.

i read this article about the riaa's claimed losses and it pretty much validates my suspicions. as aversed to several years ago, record stores (like most stores, period) keep less backstock and order primarily what they'll need until next order, on top of odds and ends needed for variety. basically they try and keep the backrooms as empty as possible, and it's a good method to try and ensure better revenue. this has nothing to do with file-sharing, it's simply more efficient. then there's riaa, who records all units shipped as 'sales'. so they ship less, and claim a loss. despite the fact that on top of a more streamlined ethic in record stores, there's an increase in actual sales (not shipped items), the riaa claims a loss (which borders on lies) and then cites file-sharing as major factor of thier 'losses' (a bigger lie). i have to work hard to imagine an actual motivation for the riaa's tenacity in confronting file-sharers. the fools looked right at a medium that distributes music with no costs and litigated at it for years until realizing that maybe the absence of shipping, and mass production costs might make it a venue worth cultivating. they shot themselves in the foot. they ignored a changing market, thier own market, and blamed the consumer, thier consumer, and still made money. they're too damn lucky to be so poor at thier job.

then there's mpaa. they're less litigious. however, they've been known, on occasion to harrass alledged file sharers rather consistantly. they're another organization that has little motivation to extort money out of thier target market. it's true you can get movies online for free, however you can't get full featured dvd's so easily and that leaves them relatively secure. in addition to that, they seem to be making fabulous amounts of money from the box office anyways, which piss-poor telesync videos can't compare with. at least they're not so aggressive, maybe that organization will get over this fad of abusing entertainment markets.

lastly, there's software piracy. oddly enough there's little litigation here and it's the only industry i can think of that might be in the right to start. but don't get me wrong, the biggest problem with software piracy isn't with games, it's with OS's and business applications. it's not kids either, it's businesses and schools. although it's less wide-spread now, i used to be able find entire buildings using the same copy of office, 98, me, and 2000, in addition to various other insanely expensive software being mass pirated. this, at least, was largely curbed by online activation and whatnot, but where there isn't a process like that there's an open invitation to piracy. like with games, although i don't have much sympathy for gaming companies who complain about piracy, a lot of it comes from the fact that very few games have protection past cd-check. that's pretty weak. couple that with the fact only a few games are released each year that are actually worth 50 dollars and you have me on p2p networks downloading a different game each week and passing it as fast as the food i ate before installing.

now discuss!