An End to the RIAA’s Reign of Terror?
August 30th, 2005 by Matt
For those of you who haven’t yet year about Patricia Santangelo, the single mother of five who is fighting back against the RIAA – I suggest you check out this article.
Now that we’re all familiar with that event, let’s move on to an interesting post made on Boing Boing today. According to Patricia’s lawyers, this might signal an end to lawsuits that (so far) have resulted in zero convitions and thousands of out of court settlements. Her lawyer said that because he is confident that he will win and recoup her fee from the RIAA, his firm should be able to represent a lot more people. Then the RIAA should realize that they can’t just pressure people into settlements – at least that’s the idea.
For far more in depth coverage than I could offer, I point you to three places:
Boing Boing
P2PNet
Recording Industry vs The People
Personally I’m really interested to see how this is going to turn out. I can’t deny that downloading music from anywhere not sponsored by record label or band is definetely of questionable legality. However, I don’t think it’s this big, evil thing that the RIAA would like to make it out to be. Your thoughts?
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Ekko // Aug 30, 2005 at 6:27 pm
Thanks for this post, dude. We all need to be aware of this shit.
Anonymous // Aug 30, 2005 at 7:17 pm
If the artist approves of it, then I have zero problem.
mike // Aug 31, 2005 at 7:27 am
its hard to know whether the artist approves, and whether thier opinion differs from the official line. I just try to promote bands, and try to avoid making available albums/ mainstream singles because that seems to be where the hassle is found
I don’t see any problem with providing links to mp3′s on the net nor uploading live stuff without permission
Anonymous // Sep 6, 2005 at 5:10 pm
Lemme give you an example of how downloading provides artists with better exposure and more listenership. I didn’t have any idea of how the Fiery Furnaces or The Black Keys sounded until I downloaded them on a P2P network. I dug ‘em and turned my friends on to them and in turn bought tickets to their concerts and so did my friends… (4 of us went to see the Fiery’s, 8 of us went to see The Keys!) I’ve heard before that it is the concerts where the artists actually make most of their money since the record deal isn’t usually that lucrative for independent artists. If that’s the case, then these groups really benefitted a lot by my downloading their music. We certainly would never have gone to these shows because where we live there is no radio station playing this type of music, the only place you could possibly hear ‘em would be on the web, so we drove an hour and we bought their CD’s and T-Shirt and buttons at the shows…