FILE SHARERS THRIVE UNDER RIAA THREAT

[Sean Mota]

Entire Article: Here


September 11, 2003 -- Lawsuits haven't stamped out music swapping, according to one Manhattan software company. In fact, it's just made traders more defiant - and crafty.
"There doesn't seem to be any decline. Many people are still doing it," said Greg Bildson, chief technology officer for Lime Wire LLC. Along with Kazaa and Grokster, Lime Wire is one of the leading "peer-to-peer" programs that allow file swapping between different computers.

Bildson said that he expects users will tinker with the Lime Wire software over the next few months, developing ways to mask their identities and avoid lawsuits. Earlier this week, the Recording Industry Association of America sued 261 people who had used Lime Wire and other software to swap copyrighted material.

 

[John Corn]

File sharing doesn't hurt the artists much at all, as they make next to nothing on their recordings. The way the music industry is currently structured, air play and CD sales are pretty much just marketing vehicles for the artists, who make their money off of live performances. If you'd like the details on how this works, click here(it's part 3 of a 4 part article, but you can navigate to the entire piece, if interested).

Although many musicians resent it when people download their music free, most of them don't lose much money from the practice, because they earn so little from copyright. "Clearly, copyright can generate a huge amount of money for those people who write songs that become mass sellers," says Simon Frith, a rock scholar in the film-and-media department at the University of Stirling, in Scotland, and the editor of Music and Copyright (1993). But most musicians don't write multimillion-sellers. Last year, according to the survey firm Soundscan, just eighty-eight recordings -- only .03 percent of the compact discs on the market-accounted for a quarter of all record sales. For the remaining 99.97 percent, Frith says, "copyright is really just a way of earning less than they would if they received a fee from the record company." Losing copyright would thus have surprisingly little direct financial impact on musicians. Instead, Frith says, the big loser would be the music industry, because today it "is entirely structured around contracts that control intellectual-property rights -- control them rather ruthlessly, in fact."

If the primary method of distributing music becomes free (or very inexpensive) internet downloads, musicians will probably be better off. They get their marketing done at a much lower cost and are in no way impeded from engaging in their primary money-making activity - live performance.

The RIAA is in fear of themselves becoming extinct. :!:

 

[Stargazer]

Seeing the increase in satellite radio sales that should help out the music industry in itself.