RIAA (Almost) Grasps The Obvious
The RIAA has finally figured out that recordable media is a much bigger tool in the industry of music piracy than P2P.
Well, DUH!.
Every bit as much as the RIAA’s members have a long history of taking talentless artists and turning a huge profit through the art of “creative marketing”, every statement released by the RIAA in regards to piracy is more “creative marketing” with the goal of preserving a failing business model.
Spinning the clock back to a post I wrote 3 years (and two weblogging engines ago), I said:
Until I see any evidence that the RIAA/MPAA actually cares about real acts of theft of their materials that happens every day on the street corners of major cities around the country– as well as through mail order and online– I cannot take anything they say regarding piracy through downloads even remotely serious.
The sudden demonification of recordable media is no different. The RIAA is using this recent “discovery” to justify shipping more broken recordings in the form of copy protected CDs.
Now, the RIAA is claiming that the new “copy protection” schemes are good for consumers because the CDs provide already encoded DRM’d music files on the CDs. I am willing to bet that one of the other mouths of the RIAA is busy stating that new CDs have less music — fewer minutes of content — because the Evil Pirates are Forcing them to include multiple copies of each song on the CD.
And, of course, none of this addresses the real piracy problem. To this day, if you walk down the street in certain areas of Manhattan, San Francisco, Chicago or any other major city in North America (or, for that matter, the world), you can easily find 10s of thousands of copies of the latest releases of CDs for sale on the street. All cheap copies.
Copy protection does absolutely nothing to prevent this kind of mass piracy. A modern disk duplication device costs less than $20,000 and will quite happily create exact duplicates of just about whatever you throw at it, copy protection and all.
It is interesting to note that the RIAA (and MPAA) is at least giving some accurate lip service to the notion that there is organized crime pirating music. Either the RIAA/MPAA has the wrong focus or law enforcement has its head up its ass as the only busts seem to be random mid level drug bosses that were doing a half assed job of branching out into the music/movie piracy business. See this Wired article for more info.
But if you look at the street product, it isn’t being produced by some half-assed drug and gun runner as a little side business. Someone, somewhere, is producing 10s of thousands of copies of various pieces of contents and dumping it on the streets through a series of street corner vendors. Very clearly, a professional operation dedicated to mass distribution of content.
Oddly, this stuff is sold quite openly and without any apparent fear of arrest. Numerous times, I have watched cops stroll right past cardboard boxes full of pirated CDs and movies. Hell, I have watched a cop buying a CD from one of these street corner vendors while the “Polex” watch vendor three feet away had just frantically stuffed all his “product” into a blanket for fear of being busted.
So, I stand by my words of three years ago:
Until the RIAA addresses the obvious, organized, and high volume piracy of content that occurs daily and openly on the streets of every major city in the country, I cannot take anything they say about piracy seriously.