Buy It, Asshole!

Finally, RIAA decides calling potential customers 'criminals' is a bad marketing model:

After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy.

The decision represents an abrupt shift of strategy for the industry, which has opened legal proceedings against about 35,000 people since 2003. Critics say the legal offensive ultimately did little to stem the tide of illegally downloaded music. And it created a public-relations disaster for the industry, whose lawsuits targeted, among others, several single mothers, a dead person and a 13-year-old girl.

Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider's customers making music available online for others to take.

Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.

(via Political Bloviation via quinnelk)

Okay, lawsuits don't equal criminal proceedings, but it's still a great way to alienate customers instead of embracing technology and enabling them to feel connected with their favorite artists.  And yeah, RIAA's enlisting the help of other capitalist pigdogs to clamp down on the filesharing, but at least it doesn't rely on the civil legal system.  It's a step...

ntodd

Comments

[General Zod]

Okay, lawsuits don't equal criminal proceedings, but it's still a great way to alienate customers instead of embracing technology and enabling them to feel connected with their favorite artists

A "customer" is someone who actually buys something. Someone who buys an album, and then file shares it to 4 or 500 of his closest friends is not "embracing technology and enabling them to feel connected with their favorite artists". It's theft, no matter how you want to parse it away with your idiotic explanation.

[Auguste]

A "customer" is someone who actually buys something.

Nearly without exception, every person who fileshares is a customer (as in actually having bought something) of the record companies. In fact, several artists, record companies and studies have all concluded that filesharing has not hurt record sales in the slightest.

It's theft, I'll grant you, but have you ever accepted a mix tape from a friend? If you have, then we're just parsing numbers.

[Sonny]

Yeah, criminals:
http://www.riaa.com/newsitem.php?id=5B7A1145-01B2-EC94-56A1-36A084A8FDC9
I didn't see the inbound linkback on my blog until today, better late than never...