p2pnet - rss feed: Happy Christmas from the RIAA
p2p news / p2pnet: You know what? The Big Four record labels, Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music and EMI, really don’t give a single hot damn about their customers.
And that’s YOU!
It’s only a couple of weeks before Christmas but they’re proudly bragging that they’ve fired off another 751 subpoenas (read copyright-infringement lawsuits) at men, women and even children across the US, bringing the total number to more than 17,000.
Talk about Scrooge!
“At stake is the music industry’s ability to invest in the next generation of music and a chance for legal online music services to flourish,” Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), said in a statement, according to internetnews.com.
Jeez! What a total load of old bollocks.
“The latest batch of RIAA lawsuits comes a day after market research firm NPD Group issued numbers claiming illegal downloads have fallen 11 percent since the Supreme Court ruled in June that Grokster and other P2P companies were operating illegal businesses,” the story goes on,
The NPD Group appeared out of nowhere to start churning out highly questionable statistics blatantly slanted towards the entertainment cartels.
This is the outfit which came out with a report which claimed iTunes was beating LimeWire.
Back in 2003, when NPD first started producing reports on file sharing, and so on, we emailed them asking how many years’ experience they’d had in the field. We didn’t get an answer and when we visited their site, we weren’t able to find a single music industry client. In fact, three representative companies on NPD Group’s client list, plucked from the top, centre and bottom, were:
- adidas International;
- International Flavors & Fragrance; and,
- Wrigley
Moreover, the NPD numbers were disputed by Eric Garland, ceo of p2p research and media measurement firm BigChampagne who told internetnews.com:
“In fact, in every month since Grokster, P2P activity is actually higher than it was in May/June, or at any other point.”
p2pnet has been rebutting RIAA claims for several years, now, and as we said on December 11, at the least, 51 million people in America alone currently share music with each other via the p2p networks, and the number is going up, not down. In the US in November, 2004, on average, 5,445,275 people were simultaneously logged onto one or more of the p2p networks at any one time, says p2p research firm BigChampagne.
By November this year, the number had risen to 6,530,408.
But the sue ‘em all campaign isn’t confined to America. Music lovers around the world are also being persecuted by Big Four enforcement organizations identical to the RIAA and which, like the RIAA, claim their terror tactics are having a marked effect.
However, this, too, is a complete distortion of reality,
Globally, the number of people sharing at any given moment in November, 2003, was 4,392,816. By November, 2004, it had reached 7,452,184 and by this November, the figure was 9,168,812.
But, “Whether the amount of illegal P2P downloading is up or down, the RIAA pledged to continue its lawsuits,” says internetnews.com.
“We must do everything to protect the integrity of the marketplace,” it quotes Cary Sherman, the RIAA’s deputy chief Fact Realignment Specialist as saying.
Here are several more facts the RIAA doesn’t care to mention, and which the mainstream media never report.
- The RIAA’s owners, Sony BMG, that model of honesty, EMI, Warner Music and Vivendi Universal, call file sharers thieves And yet with file sharing, nothing has been stolen and no one, least of all the labels, has been deprived of anything physically or in any other way.
- The Big Four say file sharing has cost them billions of dollars in sales. But they’ve never been able to demonstrate this, or to prove their the statistics.
- They say they’ve sued more than 17,000 people. However, not even one of those being victimized by the RIAA has ever appeared in court or been found guilty of anything.
- The chances of any one individual becoming an RIAA victim are the same as being struck by lightning or winning the lottery —- 17,000 to 51,000,000?
Meanwhile, we’re close to finishing off the details of a fund raising campaign for Patti Santangelo, the New York mother who’ll be defending herself against thed RIAA - and without a legal team.
She’ll be the first person of the more than 17,000 to appear in a court before a jury.
Stay tuned.
Read:-
internetnews.com - Merry Christmas From The RIAA, December 15, 2005
blatantly slanted - ‘iTunes is beating LimeWire’, June 7, 2005
as we said - Patti Santangelo fights Goliath, December 11, 2005
December 15th, 2005 at 10:24 pm
How close to the fund are we, she’s running out of time.
December 15th, 2005 at 11:35 pm
I’m going as fast as I can.
Cheers!
December 16th, 2005 at 9:04 am
Jon not to sound pessmisitic or anything.
I know you are a man of reputation and a man who keeps your promises, though the problem is that people during this year especially have donated to a lot of people claimning that they are going to attempt to go against the big AA`s and then run away (remeber lokitorrent?).
My suggestion is this that there would be so to speak a blog or maybe a website would be setup having day by day (court day) showing whats happening in this case, any court hearings etc of the case. And another thing is it possible to have some sort of accountability of what happend to the funds, where they were invested, who was payed etc etc) during the time that the case would be heard.
Sorry if I am being pathethic but as much as I like to see Ms.Patricia wins against the big AA`s in court, I also do not like for people to be bitten again from the previous experiences.
December 22nd, 2005 at 9:13 pm
May I suggest that p2p and other anti-riaa individuals run for federal office. If the people in office don’t understand the implications, then we need to put people in office who do.