Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Vote for question on DOJ helping RIAA, directed to Pres. Obama

The White House has set up a link for questions to ask the President. People can vote on which questions they link.

In searching the questions just now, I came across this one:

Why do you think it's a good idea to side with the RIAA and back a 150k fine per illegal download? What possible business could any kind of government (much less the president) have to do with downloading music?
If you want to vote for that question, or ask your own, here's the link:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/openforquestions/



Keywords: lawyer digital copyright law online internet law legal download upload peer to peer p2p file sharing filesharing music movies indie independent label freeculture creative commons pop/rock artists riaa independent mp3 cd favorite songs intellectual property portable music player

8 comments:

Eric said...

Playing the devils advocate here. One of Americas top export is IP, specifically media. In order to protect that revenue stream we must defend, no matter how obscene, the current copyright laws on the books or seem weak.

My personal opinion is "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss".

raybeckerman said...

We should let him know that (a) suing college students, and suing the working people, and (b) expanding the scope of copyright law so that people who do not have a staff of lawyers on retainer are afraid to engage in creative activities... are not what we elected him to do.

Justin Olbrantz (Quantam) said...

I realize that I'm a bit behind the times (this was from late last year, and I'm just now learning about it) and that it's only barely on topic, but I bet a lot of people here would be interested in this data. It's piracy data gathered from a DRM-free game. The two key statistics are these:
1. The estimated percentage of all copies that were pirated: 82%
2. The estimated percentage of actual lost sales due to piracy, as a percentage of the number of sales they actually made: 0.6%

While that first number is higher than I would have expected, the latter is much lower. I've always been an opponent of draconian DRM and anti-piracy efforts like the RIAA's based on the belief that 5 or 10% losses (what I was imagining them to be) was low enough that it was easier to just eat them as part of the cost of doing business than to try unsuccessfully to reclaim them. But 0.6% losses is NOTHING; they probably lose more than that due to accidental accounting errors.

raybeckerman said...

I rejected a comment because it repeatedly misused the term "piracy". Sorry. But I don't like to repeat misinformation here.

"Piracy" is not a synonym for "copyright infringement", it is a certain type of copyright infringement, a type I have never seen in any of these cases.

telenieko said...

Oh, I get it wrong or Americans abroad (living outside the U.S.) cannot vote questions? A zip code is required for registering and must be valid.

(Not that I am American, but wanted to vote anyway ;)

Justin Olbrantz (Quantam) said...

...okay, Blogger seems to have eaten my link. Let's see if this one works

Anonymous said...

A quick search for riaa brings up 9 great questions. You might want to mention that someplace.

Another Kevin said...

Isn't the SG's office more or less required to defend the laws that the Congress has written? I don't think I've ever seen it fail to weigh in on a case that raises a serious question of Constitutionality of a statute, or to argue any position but that the Congress was within its rights to pass it.