According to this article the RIAA is going to stop the practice of seeking out and suing individual copyright violators. It sounds great because most of the suits that the RIAA filed were against people who didn’t know about P2P clients automatic folder sharing, a bunch of stay at home moms, and even one dead guy. Cases were handled differently in each state. Some were dismissed while others had to pay obscene amounts of money. The RIAA instead is going to work with ISP’s to deal with violators, which is the part that concerns me.
The RIAA clearly has shown that they don’t know how to deal with people properly. I’m worried that the RIAA will try to cut deals to monitor traffic, which will ultimately end up in a slower internet for all. The article says that the RIAA will notify ISP’s of violators, and the ISP’s will send out C&D notices. However, the RIAA still reserves the right to prosecute whom ever. Now the private information they couldn’t get before is available to them, making them more dangerous in court. I don’t trust the RIAA, so the less interaction I can have with them I prefer.
You could of course avoid this by NOT ILLEGALLY DOWNLOADING MUSIC. I mean, AmazonMP3 offers songs as low as 79 cents sometimes, highest 99 cents DRM FREE. Also, I have gotten a few albums on release day for $4 legally. Of course sometimes there is that song you cannot find on AmazonMP3, Napster, or iTunes. But at this point I rarely find that to be a problem. Stop being cheap people…
The issue is more that the RIAA is still using a dated business model… Cause there were some fun articles here and there where radio stations would actually discuss the semantics of the “Downloading is Piracy” bit and the interesting find was… Most of the “chart toppers”, people would download them and (in most cases) buy the album. Though in one of those stories… One radio station’s staff got fired over the discussion and replaced.
They have to face the facts that there will be some people who are getting sick of seeing the artists get crap for fees… but on top of that, they need to quit screwing music artists with draconian contracts. Even more so when you consider things like small artists are launching with their own store fronts for music.
Another thing that would help is if artist would release albums with more than 1 or 2 good songs. Might inspire people to actually go and buy the album.