Sunday, June 6, 2010

Shut-up Stupid Sunday: RIAA not suing


When it comes to bad guys RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is always in the top 5 on most peoples list. This group of Japanese and European record companies is famous for launching huge lawsuits against people who can’t afford lawyers.

They sue this people up to $100 million per song that they share. So if someone has an iPod that holds 40,000 downloaded songs they figure that is worth $40 Trillion, or slightly more than all the money, bonds, stocks, and liquid assets that exist. The imbalance is a little extreme the monetary value of the entire Earth is less than a filled iPod.

They say they do this to protect the property rights of the artists, even though the artists only receive pennies per album and make their money on concerts and merchandising and the more a song is shared the more people show up at concerts and the more the artists make.

But oddly RIAA the most sue happy group on Earth is totally silent when politicians steal artists music. Instead the artists have to bring up the lawsuits individually when a politician steals a group’s song and uses it in their campaign.

If RIAA were serious about protecting the artist they would be the ones to step forward and stop politicians from using songs without permission. But of course they are not serious about that, they are only trying to preserve a business model where the middleman makes over 90% of the profit.

So when RIAA says they are trying to protect the artist, I say, “Shut up Stupid, you are suing to stop things that help artists and staying silent when someone does something to hurt an artist.”

By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts

1 comment:

Stephanie Barr said...

Freaking out over piracy (except in cases where counterfeits are unsafely substandard)is usually much ado about very little. Whenever the industry in question makes things reasonably priced, the piracy becomes negligible. It's only when industry tries to take an unreasonable profit where piracy runs rampant.

I hope the RIAA learns quickly and the publishing industry learns from the past idiocy of the movie industry or writers will be the ones to suffer.