Saturday, March 26, 2011

RIAA Shows Its True Colors

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For years I have made it clear that the music industry has been busy destroying itself through it's parasitic and disrespectful behavior toward both its musicians and its customers. Their behavior fits perfectly into the biznizz (as opposed to business) concepts of Marketing Morons and Marketing-As-Management. The general problem with this self-destructive practice is outright hatred toward their clients, accompanied by corresponding behavioral acts of Abuse.


The response of clients to Marketing Morons and Marketing-As-Management is reciprocal abuse. When someone hates us, we humans tend to hate them back and provide our own corresponding behavioral acts.


The largest music corporations use a group they created called the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) as their lobbying and persecution arm of what I call the Corporate Oligarchy. Part of what the RIAA lobbies against and persecutes is reciprocal abuse from their clients. The trail of client abuse against the recording industry is long. The first large client revolt occurred with the creation of Napster. The revolt continues today with the Gnutella network. In response, the RIAA has been prosecuting individual music sharing users as well as large organizations, attempting to point their finger at them all as the actual culprits in the decline of the music industry.


Nothing says what the RIAA is really about better than what they recently did in their court case against LimeWire:


Judge: RIAA request for trillions in LimeWire copyright case is 'absurd'
The music industry’s contention that file-sharing software maker LimeWire owes it trillions of dollars in damages for enabling the illegal distribution of 11,000 copyrighted songs is “absurd,” a federal judge has ruled.
In response, Ray Beckerman, lawyer representing the defendants in the RIAA music piracy lawsuits, has said:
“The RIAA’s argument was totally absurd, and contrary to the statute.... Even the RIAA had never made that argument until late in the case. If I were Judge Wood, I would have ordered them to show cause why they should not have been sanctioned for making [such] a frivolous argument.”
Judge Kimba Wood, judge in the case has stated that the RIAA's damages request amounts to:
"... more money than the entire music industry has made since Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877."
Such is the level of insanity among the companies represented by the RIAA.


My personal response to RIAA abuse and madness is to boycott their company products and to instead support independent musicians and music companies who still support ART instead of customer abuse. I am also supportive of the victims of recent the RIAA's abusive and inflated royalty fees, Internet radio.


Please support independent music, if only to provide musicians their livelihood and to create a more user and musician friendly music business of the future.
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