This is a legitimate candidate for stupidest BS in the American business world. In business math 102 or simple calculus they teach that there is a price for anything which maximizes profits and that price is NOT the highest price you could ever get for one copy. The whole world seems to know that EXCEPT for the RIAA which went in a single day from selling LPs for $7 to selling CDs which were cheaper to produce for $16 - $18 and they've never dropped the price a dime since then and they wonder why people share files over the internet.
Somebody needs to sue the RIAA into tommorrow-morrow land, this thing they're doing is harassment pure and simple and it amounts to the same thing as cops pulling an individual car here and there out of a line of traffic for speeding, which also will not hold up in court on a permanent basis.
These folks will also randomly select businesses...restaurants, gyms, retail stores - and see if they are playing the radio throughout the business.
If they are, then the extortion of the business owner begins.
"Somebody needs to sue the RIAA into tommorrow-morrow land..."
Absolutely. You also mentioned their illegal price fixing. How the corporate mother can get away with this defies the imagination. CD's literally cost pennies to make, yet the prices remain fixed......probably forever.
Bogus morality works both ways......let the downloads continue until the RIAA and the record industry in general gets called to task for their own sins.
Good point. I've wondered about that, too.
Also, I am sure they are REAL concerned about the "session players, sound engineers, cd plant workers, wharehouse personnel, record store clerks". I am sure they are VERY concerned that these people get a GREAT pay check. Yeah, those jet-set high-roller Hollywood-type warehouse workers. Just a guilt trip they use on the suckers they catch.
This is the same industry that got legislation passed that includes money to them for every recordable CD sold, because they will supposedly be used to record copyrighted works. But if you download the works, they sue you. Bastages shouldn't be able to have it both ways.
You know it seems to me that there must be price collusion in the music industry. It is rediculous that I can buy movies cheaper than a music album.
The only music I've bought in years, was second hand CD's.
"I fail to see any real difference between loading files from the internet and copying them off the air from your radio. I mean, a hundred dollar radio. a patch cable and a copy of cooledit or something and you can make your own mp3 files off the fricking air. They gonna start charging us for owning radios?"
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It's OK to copy a song off the radio via air. What the RIAA is bitching about is that private citizens don't have the rights to distribute the music.
It is not the copying that they are going after, it's the people involved in the distribution.
I am wholeheartedly against the US copyright laws that allow an effectively infinite timespan to own a work. Patents only allow 17 or 20 years, which should also be enough time for a song to sell a bundle for their creator. This would drive the really talented people to work harder instead of sitting on a song's royalties forever.
A very interesting concept and I wonder if it has been used as a defense. In reality, you would have to ensure that the aired song is the exact same recording as that downloaded, otherwise you are taking from one set of musicians, recording staff, etc., over another. It would truly have to be apples-to-apples.
At the same time, I pay monthly for dozens of music channels as part of my base "cable" package (DirecTV, actually) and therefore have the personal use rights to those songs, do I not? All it would take is the technology to capture them in a usable format (separated by song, an indexing system). The RIAA has its tax on us through the products we buy and while it might be pennies individually, I'm sure the aggregate amounts are significant.
We also know the recording industry has lost class action suits but in a reverse flow of the pennies analogy, pennies are all we got back while trial lawyers and professional plaintiffs reap the benefits. I hope the next class-action settlement has as a condition the unconditional clearing of all the music on the original WKRP episodes and we get to see them again!
Your two legal options are:
1) Don't buy the music;
B) Get a better job.
I was thinking of buying one to try out.
With all due respect, they did drop the price to 99 cents per track or $9.99 for an album, downloaded.