The RIAA doesn't have a problem with using technology, they have a problem with technology letting users rip off their clients. SDMI is not something that kills the MP3 format, it is a set of specifications that will allow MP3 file to be copy protected digitally.

As for their latest suit againts MP3.com, MP3.com blatantly violated copyright law. I hope MP3.com has to pay the total sum (upwards of 6 billion I think) so that it sends a wake-up call to the internet; musicians, whom the RIAA represents, will not stand for their property to be stolen on the internet.

In the future, these companies like MP3.com should discuss their plans with the RIAA BEFORE implementing them. Whether you like the RIAA or not, they perform a service for musicians that would otherwise not be performed and the musicians would lose out on a lot of revenue. If you're not a musician or in the music industry, do a little reading, I suggest "Music, Money and Success: the Insider's Guide to the Music Industry" by Jeffrey Brabec and Todd Brabec or "Successful Artist Management: Strategies for Career Development in the Music Business" by Xavier M. Frascogna, Jr. and H. Lee Hetherington, before you start spekaing abot things you know nothing about. These two books were standard reading in my Recording Industry major and cover quite a bot of ground about the RIAA's purpose, and how musicians are compensated.

It sounds like you work for the RIAA. At one time all I did was play music for a living. After groups like RIAA, BMA, ASCAP,.... put there gready little hands in the pot there is not enough money left for the artist to surive on. So for the last 10 years I've had to rely on a day job too. It really makes me mad when they say they are helping the music industry. They just line thier own pockets with the artist's money. If any body is ripping of the artist it's the RIAA.

Ge0ph

Yeah, I'm sure that artists and business men had to run everything by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union too. There's a word for group that try to stifle innovation in the market....Communists.

I am a graphic designer actually who's concerned that my copyrights are being infringed by the likes of you. Copyright applies to all intellectual property; music, art, literature. You screw musicians out of their rights to obtain compensation for their copyrighted material, you screw me out of my rights to seek compensation for my designs.

Apparantly you weren't a very good musician or you might have better things to say about the RIAA, plenty of musicians and publishers do.

The RIAA does nto stifle innovation. They support the MP3 and WMA standards, they just want to make sure their artists ar ecompensated for their work. The Beam-It site robs artists from royalties earned in a number of ways. MP3.com clearly violated copyright laws. If they didn;t like the copyright laws then they should have sought legal recourse prior to offering Beam0It. MP3.com has nothing to blame but themselves. They have been constantly testing the limits of copyright protection in the US and it looks like they screwed the wrong poodle this time.

BTW, the RIAA are far from communists. In fact a society which collaborates for the greater good of that community (sounds like Linux?) is more akin to Communism the any stifling of innovation. Communism in practice keeps certain groups from being abel to speak out and would stifle innovation if they allowed more than one company (run by the government of course) to compete in the market.

"mp3.com clearly violated the copyright laws."

in what way? giving people access to music they already had access to? please cite examples.
whether or not they did violate the laws is for the courts to decide, but imho i should be able to have access to music i own on the internet -- especially if a company like mp3.com is so gracious to offer me free and virtually unlimited storage.

Ok, lets say you sell a piece of your artwork to someone and they want to display it in their place of business. Because it is there, someone else sees it and in turn buys a piece of art from you. Sounds good so far but wait. There is a RIAA type organization that makes sure you get paid for your artwork. They are there to protect your rights.

1. You can’t just sell your work to that first person; it has to be sold through the RIAA type association so they can get their cut of the money. You know, to help fund them so they can make sure you get your money. So you will probably charge a little more for your art to cover the extra cost. So not as many people will buy your work.

2. That person could not display your work in there place of business because all those people that might look at it did not pay for it and therefore they don’t have the right to look at it. In order for the business to display your work they will have to buy a special license. Because of the cost of the license they decide not to display the art.

3. Because they did not display the art the people who come to their business did not see it and therefore did not buy it.

This is what is happening in the music industry. The music industry is far more complicated then the art world. And I hope you never have to answer to some big association for every little piece of work you produce. It’s your work.

As far as being a good musician, that’s just a matter of opinion. I have been in the music industry for over 30 years and the last 10 has been the worst. You would almost have to be in the industry to see that these guys are just trying to protect the money that goes in their pocket, not the musician.

Ge0ph

Reading these posts are getting me fired up again. :) I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but I think we should stop whining about the RIAA in forums and chat rooms all over the 'Net and actually do something about this. If anyone has any ideas, I'd like to hear 'em. I honestly think that, if we pull together, we can lay these fools out.

We can make the RIAA embrace this new era of computer technology. Let's see it this way, the RIAA is fighting the mp3 format and "Beam-IT" because they feel that the supporting artists will lose their
money. They need to realize that music CD's are the thing of the past
and need to go over the fact that technology has progressed to allow
all sorts of duplication to be possible. The RIAA is only hurting itself by claiming to protect its artists and failing to embrace the
new strives to get music across all platforms capable of delivering
music. Why can't they fight fire with fire? They should bring out their high quality music in a secure format and in tightly compressed form. However, I see two flaws with this idea.

I just watched the Beam-It demonstration so I decided to give it a try. My MP3 player was not able to play it because beam-it had a URL in the playlist (m3u) file. (Right click the link to play the file and choose Save Target As... to download the m3u separately.) I then discovered that I could just easily open the URL in Internet Explorer and save the .mp3 to my hard drive. I can only imagine how much this could increase music piracy because people could exchange mp3.com links without even transferring files with eachother. I hope I'm wrong about this though.

I just tried giving one of the URLs in the M3U to a friend who does not even have a my.mp3.com account and it worked for him. All someone has to do is make up a list of URLs for different songs. I can't believe how careless mp3.com was about this. The RIAA definitely has a case here.

enough of this bulls*** about mass distribution from my.mp3.com accounts.

1st myth is mass distribution is easily done thru any my.mp3.com account by linking urls.

truth: you can only have one stream being sent to anywhere from your account at the same time. when you have more than one going, it does send an mp3, but that mp3 has a voice message saying that you can't have multiple streams. this would pretty much prevent "trading m3u links" unless accounts are setup just for trading. however just because abuse potential is there doesnt make it illegal. for example -- are guns illegal?

2nd myth is that beam it identifys cds by just the cd id number. that can't be possible, because beam it reads more than just a few sectors off of a cd when its checking it. do you really think it would take a 32x cd rom drive 20-30 seconds to read a tiny serial number off of a cd?

and for those of you who say "i can insert my friends cds and instantly i have access to them -- riaa should be on their asses!" well whats stopping you from ripping the cd to you hard drive? the most it would take would be 15 minutes. "but this is instantaneous" you say, well i dont think its instantaneous to download 15 128kbps mp3s for 95% of internet users with 56k modems.

beam-it is pretty damn legit. riaa is sueing because of licensing issues, and are just using beam it as leverage.

hopefully they dont put a court order to freeze my.mp3.com. . .

Don't worry, those links don't last long. mp3.com resets though after some ammount of time (days?)

So if you took the time to compile a list, it would be obsolete within a week.

Just think how long it will be before someone will write a program that will automatically keep a list of links up to date for a certain account.

It's time for the RIAA to realize that advances in computer technology
is going to put their worthless, meaningless, and backwards-thinking organization out of business. Stop fighting computer technology and accept the defeat. Game over, RIAA.

How much does the RIAA get paid for all those Juke boxes out there in the world or all of those clubs that play music. Oh heck they are just gonna have to beef up their efforts and start policing everyone and charging them for illegally enjoying music. I'm mean realistically look at it. A jukebox plays a record over and over again for hundreds of people who don't have to pay for the record in order to enjoy the music. The only one who pays for the record is the vending company that owns the jukebox, what kind of liscense do they have? How much do radio stations have to pay the RIAA for the privilage of using their music and (illegally) allowing others to listen to it? What happens if I can here the cd player of the guy in the car next to me? Am I listening without express written permission from the RIAA? I wish they knew how moronic they sounded. I also wish that they could get a legal aid/typist that knew how to use a spell checker on a document. I'm not sure if that's the fault of the RIAA or MP3.com but man that doc has some major typos and a very very misleading language. I makes it appear that somehow MP3.com is allowing users to listen to CD's that neither MP3.com nor the end user has purchased, while the word I get from MP3.com is that they (mp3.com) did purchase some 45,000 titles and will allow you to listen to them provided that you own a legal copy of the title or provided that you purchase a copy via an authorized dealer. Sounds all nice and legal to me. But what do I know I'm just a person, not an organization with all the smarts that entails.

nhavar,

The people owning jukebox, and the radio stations of the world DO pay a fee for playing those CD's. In fact, from what I hear, the RIAA is quite disappointed they didn't charge the radio stations more way back when.

So the problem I see with Mp3.com's situation, is that they refused to talk about a licensing fee. That was the open door for RIAA to sue. As you know, they sue everyone.

I think the RIAA's suing technique is a good one in THEIR eyes. They must try to stop the mp3 flood until they can get their own solution up and working! SDMI, whatever. It's going to take a while, and until they figure it out, any slow down is a good one for their continuation of ancient money techniques.

The sad thing is, when the RIAA sued Napster, they were quoted to list mp3.com as one of the places that were good to the mp3 scene, and was trying to honestly add to that genre. Guess that history goes out th3e window when there's money to be made!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Don't get me wrong, I have 94 GB of mp3's myself. And since I'm not trying to make money from it, i doubt I'll get sued anytime soon :)

I am a musician and I run a company that owns those jukeboxes. Trust me, we get charged a lot for those jukeboxes and cd’s. And the bars gets charged a lot to have a live band. Some bars have quit having bands because these fee’s cost too much. What makes me mad is we pay a fee for the CD, and another fee when we buy the juke box and another one to have them in a public place. And all those fee’s goes to the same people. Can we say double taxing. A radio station pays a very large fee to put music on the air and then the public places that plays that same music on there radio has to pay a fee for that same music again.

Another thing that really upsets me is the artist’s really gets very little (if any) of that money. It mostly goes to the associations that collect the money (to pay for the people to go out and collect the money).

Ge0ph

Thanks Rader and Ge0ph for the clarification on the monitary issues of radio/juke boxes. This shows even further how the RIAA is screwing both the public and the private sectors.

The basic thought pattern the RIAA is going towards is the same that software is at/has been at. For example with most software the license states that you can use it in your home on as many desktops as you want, but that if you have a laptop you much purchase a seperate copy for use on that portable device. The RIAA will eventually want the same thing. "Oh well make however many copies for you own home use, but if you want to listen to music in the car or at work or at a friends house you'll have to buy another copy of the CD for each place." Total greedy crap if you ask me. I bet anything that RIAA would not have a problem if MP3 gave up revenue to them, (I'm sure they could come to some suitable financial agreement HA!). Another part of the problem I'm sure is that MP3.com is a great place for indipendant artists to get their music heard and well as the RIAA would put it "that's just not good for the industry..." so they have yet another excuse to try to stick it to MP3.com

The following was directed to all RIAA members by Hilary Rosen.

I regret to inform you that a suit was filed this afternoon against
MP3.Com for copyright violations.

I regret us having to file this litigation because, as you know, I do
not view litigation as the best means to a business strategy. I had hoped that we would have a different result and tried to work with Michael Robertson over the past few days to encourage license negotiations.

He ultimately refused to negotiate and therefore, a lawsuit seems to be the only way to resolve this.

I continue to believe that the best way to protect our rights on line is by your continuing to do creative deals, being in the on-line business aggressively and modeling good licensing approaches to Internet companies.

I know you agree.

Attached pleased find my letter to Michael Robertson as well as a useful Q and A for you to use as you confront questions about this action.

All the best,

Hilary

The obvious problem with this, is everyone and their uncle can take one (1) cd their friend owns, pop it in their CD-ROM, and have mp3.com remember that they 'own' the cd, and hence have access to the copyrighted materials. I dont know how in the world MP3.com could ever have felt justified in doing this. Its absolutely ludicrous for a publicly held company to be doing something like this, and I'm quite sure, and hope, that the RIAA wins this lawsuit. This is one of the few lawsuits lately that HAS merit.

Even if the law suit has merit, RIAA does not. They are a self proclaimed defender of the artist. I'm and artist and they have done nothing for me.

"everyone and their uncle can take one (1) cd their friend owns" ??
No need for that - just have the friend stream the tunes from his/her
list at mp3.com, copy the 128kbit/sec mp3s that are dumped into
the local temp file - & then email them out -- no more need for
CD rippers, CDRs, etc -- mp3com does it all for you -- hope their pockets are deep -- after the lawyers are paid, maybe the RIAA will have enough left over to at least paint the front porch at the Old Artists Home

Okay there are two problems I see
A) Just because it's possible or easy to do something illegal doesn't mean that people are going to do it.
B) a manufacturer can create anything with potential for mis-use, their task then is to warn against mis-use.

Guns, hairspray, alcohol, pantyhose, drano, cleaning solutions, shoes, jackets, steak knives, all have the potential for mis-use or cause for illegal activity and yet theirs no ban on them. The RIAA is bringing up the possibility of mis-use only in order to better their own case. In the end the RIAA could give a rat's a** whether or not the system is abused as long as they are getting there percentage of the profits from that system. The RIAA has continually tried to block technological progress based on the issue of their bottom dollar. For example the RIAA killed DAT tapes, was opposed to commercial sales of CD-R, has yet to fully embrace the mini-disc, tried to outright block the RIO, wants to replace MP3 with their own proprietary format which might disable your equipment if used incorrectly, and the list goes on and on.
My personal oppinion is that peronal recording technology has been around for some time. I.E. Cassette tapes. And yet even though I'm from a family of hoodlums and music junkies I don't seem to have ANY illegally taped copies of my friends or families music. "Well how can that be? It's so easy to do? Why wouldn't you do it?" I don't know the answer to that one. For whatever reason it seems that if a friend has a CD I like I might borrow it from him once or twice, beyond that I'm likely to buy it. This dispite the fact that he could take it in the next room and burn me my very own copy for a buck. Then again maybe I'm a little polly-anna about all this. Maybe there are more evil, wicked, cheating, lying people out there than I think there are (then again maybe there are less than any of us think, or that the media allows us to think)...

This story is not all correct. Beam-it does not allow you to "**copy*** music directly from CD-ROM to an online storage space." The beam-it software just determines what CDs a person own "legally" and allow the person to access those CDs through the my.mp3.com website. Beam-it does not rip the CDs. It only determines what CD/track you have so the process only takes ~2 minutes.

If that's true, then what's the RIAA all uptight about? They really need to pull their heads out of their asses and realize that they aren't in control here. Is it me, or has the RIAA been smoking crack recently (w/ the Napster suit and all...)? I don't they're actually thinking about what they're doing.

they probably just don't know any other way to make money :)

The RIAA, BMI, ASCAP, and all the other music money suckers have done more damage to the music industry that any one else. I am a working musician and have been for 25 years. All of these big associations only make money to pay themselves. If they were not in the picture the artist would probably put more money in there own pockets, even with the illegal copying of there work (the smart one’s call it “free promotion”). All the money these guys collect for the artist only pays for them to go collect the money. After paying themselves there is none left for the artist.
I could rant all day about this but it’s time to go down to the pub a play some music.

Ge0ph

Bah, sorry about that. The first time I heard about Beam-It it seemed rather unclear. Thank you for correcting my mistake. I apologize and will fix the article.

~Aaron

I swear the RIAA are soo f*cking retarded. I think they should sue themselves. I feel like going over to their page and writing them an email telling them that times are changing and that they should get with it!

Read it one more time...Aaron got it right

Read the comment right below.... Aaron already corrected the story.