Let's just pretend for a minute that the RIAA has come knocking on your door accusing you of using a P2P service to illegally share music, and violating copyrights. Your first instinct is what? If you're Jeffrey Howell, you:
Remember all of the fuss that the RIAA made over AllofMP3? They sued the Russian music website for a whopping $1.65 trillion back in December of 2006, and now that lawsuit has been dropped. Yes dropped.
In the music industry, everybody is out for money these days. The artists want their fair share, and so the RIAA is out to make sure that they do, In addition to the artists are the composers and songwriters who want their fair share of money as well, and so the ASCAP is out to make sure that they do.
WARNING: Reading this article may cause extreme uncontrollable gut-buster laughter. Continue reading at your own risk...
Some of you may not realize it, but record companies (like EMI, Warner, Sony BMG and Universal) pay rather large amounts of money each year to trade groups like the RIAA and the IFPI which funds their operations. In return, these groups support the artists and labels and spend some of their money to help stop piracy.
Demonoid, a popular invite-only BitTorrent tracker, seems to be swimming in some murky waters lately. At the end of September Demonoid was forced to temporarily shutdown by the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), which is equivalent to America's RIAA. They came back online a few days later after installing a system to block all Canadian traffic.
In the very first file-sharing case to go before a jury, Jammie Thomas of Minnesota was found guilty of copyright infringement and ordered to pay $9,250 for each of the 24 songs that were shared over Kazaa back in 2005. That means she owes the RIAA $222,000 dollars.
Many of us buy CDs and rip the music to our computers so that the songs can be put on a portable device like an iPod, Zune, etc. Many of us also do the reverse and purchase songs online, and then burn them to a CD so that they can be listened to in the car, or anywhere else. Neither of those situations in my book, is considered stealing.
We've already heard over and over again that sales of CD's are down, way down. People are turning to online services like iTunes to get their music and therefore have no reason to go out and purchase entire CD's from retailers. The recording industry isn't willing to let CD sales slip away quite yet though, so they've come up with a new way that they hope will help.
It’s amazing what AllofMP3.com has been through over the last year. They’ve been on a wild roller-coaster ride that looks as though it may be ending soon.
