[goldstategop]

Its not about protecting copyrights; its about RIAA's wanting to make sure it can make money for the record labels off the customers. Its all about greed.

[Diogenesis]

These "people" are so sick, that they deserve a boycott.

[afz400]

If anything, Kazaa has increased interest in music that is not heard on the radio anymore. The record companies should view that as a plus not try to stop it. MP3s are not good quality - lots of people hear the song and then buy the CD for better sound.

[sgtbono2002]

Perhaps if they priced their product at a fair price people would not try to copy it. This stuff is priced way too high.

[Nick Danger]

This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. It's as if the entire industry has put the legal department in charge of marketing. "These people are not buying our stuff — let's send law enforcement out there to crack their heads!"

It appears that the sales of the recording industry are indeed declining. By definition, that is a marketing problem. That means that the solutions probably lie in one of four areas:

• Price — and in particular, relative price. Music CDs are not the only thing out there competing for the entertainment dollar. DVD sales are going through the roof; they didn't exist a few years ago. Some of that money is coming out of the music industry's hide. It has to be.

  Particularly in the age group that the recording industry targets, console video games are another thing vying for the entertainment dollar.

  The recording industry has not lowered its price in many years, even in the face of these two new competitors for the entertainment dollar. The price spread between a music CD and an entire movie, with sound track, on DVD is becoming smaller all the time. Which is really the better value for the consumer? A CD at $17, or the DVD movie at $21?

• Product — I'm no music critic, so I will shut up on the subject of whether the stuff out there today 'sucks.' It probably can't be worse than the Archies. What is apparently true is that the industry is now more concentrated, and has become more risk averse, meaning that new acts with sounds that "don't fit the mold" are less likely to get any attention. Taking those risks is where new hit bands and new genres come from, so if they aren't taking those risks, what they do sell will sound tired and boring after a while. That will lead to declining sales. They should expect nothing else.

• Distribution — This is the industry's achilles heel. They have enormous sums invested in relationships with bankruptcy-bound retail music store chains. They can't abandon those guys because today, that's where the revenue comes from. So they are trapped manufacturing, shipping, and warehousing millions of little physical objects that add a lot of cost to the distribution process. This is cost that doesn't really have to be there for a large fraction of what consumers want to buy.

Is there stealing? Yes, but is that really the problem? To the point that the industry is willing to become identified in its customers' minds as a kind of legal ogre that goes around suing its customers? Treating the customers as The Enemy is a big step to take. It's a very risky proposition. But it's the first thing lawyers would think of.

Where are the people in this business who are responsible for selling music? How is it that they are allowing their legal department to dictate strategy? To alienate their customers like this? You cannot beat people with sticks to make them like you. Once they come to hate you, you don't get to sell them things anymore.

At some point, sanity must prevail. There are 30 million of these "thieves" out there. Even a 13-year-old can figure out that he's more likely to get hit by lightning than to draw one of these lawsuits. There is no real deterrent in that. Plus, breaking the rules appeals to a teenager's need to rebel against adult authority. The lawsuits just make the fruit 'forbidden' as well as tasty.

Turning the lawyers loose on the customers is nuts. The right answer for declining sales lies in one of those other areas. You have to entice people to buy things; you can't sue them into it.

If Wal*Mart was this nuts, they would have security guards roaming the store, waving guns at people and shouting "No Shoplifting!" to everyone with a shopping cart. They would be out of business within a month if they did that. The recording industry can have the same thing happen to it. There are other ways to spend the entertainment dollar.

[Radix]

The RIAA is the avant garde for the opposition to the Internet. They have been ripping people off for generations, and their Industry is the first major enterprise to feel the full brunt of the actual power of the Internet. The newspapers and the television news programs are likely to be next, though they won't see it coming until it is way too late. Other Industries with throwback marketing policies will follow.

Hey, it already is too late for those propaganda artists. I feel their pain, Not!

[Sam Cree]

bump

[new cruelty]

I think the answer is for the RIAA or some other group to come up with a new model of business (i.e. Apple's I-tunes) that provides music at a greatly reduced cost to the consumer and still produces a profit for the artists.

Such a model could charge a small fee for unlimited downloads (the more you download, the more you save) plus each download could be sponsored by a company (or companies, depending on the duration of the download) wishing to advertise a product(s). Companies could pay to advertise over a set number of downloads or on a per download basis, the more a song is downloaded, the more a product is advertised.

Downloading may take longer since the download would also include an advertisement, but the end result is the consumer gets music for cheap, the artists are rewarded for their efforts, and companies wishing to expand their advertising tap into a popular market.

[1Old Pro]

Patent rights for sharing purposes should expire after something like 10 years. Drug companies have patent protection for only 15 years before the patent is public domin and open to generic companies.

[strela]

In fact, your online behavior could land you across the courtroom from a multibillion-dollar industry.

Good. Thieves should be prosecuted and punished.