FC: Chuck Charbeneau on RIAA in action

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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From: "Charbeneau, Chuck" <CCharbeneau () lear com>
To: "'declan () well com'" <declan () well com>
Subject: RE: RIAA suing individual P2P users
Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2003 09:26:33 -0400

Here's a great example of the RIAA in action.

<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,96797,00.html";>12-Year-Old Sued
for Music Downloading</a>

Man, the RIAA sure does know how to pick fights it can win.  Kind of like
Mike Tyson heading over to the middle school to collect some lunch money.

"<em>Asked if the association knew Brianna was 12 when it decided to sue
her, Weiss answered, "We don't have any personal information on any of the
individuals."</em>"

*shrug*  Must mean all those subpoenas didn't work, then, hmmm?

At least some of the labels are getting with the program and reinventing
their profit models to fit in with today's methods of market and
distributing music.

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/business/Entertainment/forbes_concertcash_030711.html

This is just another step in the evolution in media, just as was the
cassette and the DVD.  Instead of always trying to fight the changes that
are bound to happen, shouldn't these multi-billion dollar companies spend a
little bit of money investigating how to evolve with the rest of us.

We, the consumer, keep pointing to the metal spear, and they keep picking up
the rock to kill the mammoth.  The only thing that keeps them around is the
fact that there are thousands of rock throwers in their clan - that and they
use big rocks.

Perhaps all this litigation is a stall tactic, designed to keep the rest of
us busy while they get their act together and roll out a new and improved
method for providing us with their product instead of suing their
prospective user-base.  I hope so, because I foresee a large group of
successful, forward thinking artists disassociating themselves from the RIAA
and making money as the market dictates, rather than fighting and trying to
dictate to the market how it should evolve.  I know, I know sometimes we
forget our Econ 101 class...It was so long ago.

There is an interesting sidebar in this month's wired (Oct 2003,"The CD's
Sad Song" -Rebecca Harper) that says that the number of releases on CD has
fallen by 14% while prices for CDs have climbed 16%, which means we are
paying more for fewer choices.

"The CD is reaching the end of it's life cycle, just like the cassette did
several years ago"

Like paramecium have done for billions of years...maybe it's time to evolve.

Chuck Charbeneau
Lear Corporation
Lead Software Applications Engineer
ccharbeneau at lear dot com






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