Rotten, Insensitive, Arrogant Assholes?
Found on slashdot:
“Just when you think they’ve reached rock bottom, it seems the RIAA always finds room to sink a little lower. This time they’ve sued an innocent, 19-year-old, transplant patient, hospitalized with pancreatitis and needing islet cell transplants. Although the young Pittsburgh lady claims that she did not infringe any copyrights, she failed to answer the complaint in time, and a default judgment was taken against her. A Pittsburgh area lawyer has stated that he will represent her pro bono and make a motion to open up the default.”
Gotta wonder how those jerks sleep at night.
December 8th, 2008 at 16:51
Most of the musicians I know hate the RIAA because although they claim to “protect the artist”, they’re really screwing them over and getting most of the money. I heard somewhere that after taking out recording costs and promo costs etc, and the money that the RIAA takes, the artist only gets about 5 cents for each song. Rip-off, much?
December 8th, 2008 at 16:51
Edit: for each song *sold*.
December 9th, 2008 at 05:53
The RIAA is also lying when they blame piracy and file-sharing for the decline in record sales that began around 2000. What they never mention is that there was a huge increase in record sales during the 1990s, which was the result of millions of people finally giving up on vinyl LPs and converting their collections to CDs. Once everybody was done upgrading—around 2000 or so—record sales went back down to their previous rate.
So the “decline” in record sales from 2000 onward is NOT a real decline. The sales have merely returned to their NORMAL rate. All it takes is one glance at a graph of record sales from 1980 to the present to see that this is true: You have a horizontal line, mostly rising (but with some wavering) from 1980 to 1993 or so; and then in 1994 the line shoots steeply upward, peaking in 1999; and then it falls sharply back down again, stabilizing as a horizontal line again in 2004—and if you ignore the intervening 94-99 upswing, current sales are a perfect continuum of that pre-1994 line.
The RIAA whines about record sales falling “to their lowest level in 10 years”—comparing current record sales to that peak year of 1999, and blaming the entirety of the decline since then on piracy.
But 1999 (and the whole surge in sales of which it was the peak) was a discrepancy. Comparing current record sales to that year is like comparing current sales of bottled water and portable generators to the rate at which they were selling in Louisiana just after Hurricane Katrina.
It’s a LIE—and the RIAA know it’s a lie, too.
But these are the people who claim to represent the interests of musicians, while paying them less than a dollar for every $14-20 CD they sell and pocketing the rest for themselves. Lying is par for the course for greedy bastards.