How the RIAA is lying to you

Boing Boing, which is really becoming my favorite all around blog, put an analogy up comparing Napster to Go to milk. Here’s the analogy:

What if Napster To Go were Napster The Grocery, and milk you bought could only be consumed from proprietary square mugs (known for continually sprouting holes you have to patch on your own), and milk cartons vanish from your refrigerator shelf if you don’t re-up your subscription? You’d get milk elsewhere.

Makes sense right? You would think that if you bought anything else in any other store, and you were told that if you didn’t “pay up,” you would lose access to your milk, you’d probably not bother buying milk.

But one astute reader wrote in with this:

Another aspect of the Napster to Go model is that it shows that the RIAAs claims of a lost sale for every download to be demonstrably false. If you can download an unlimited number of songs via napster and play them for as long as you continue to subscribe, then the maximum loss the RIAA suffers from a single downloader cannot exceed $15/month no matter how many songs a person downloads.

Holy crap, that’s absolutely brilliant!

I was thinking about the implications of what this guy wrote, and I’m in awe.

The RIAA has maintained, on numerous occasions, that the downloading of music completely damages the music industry because if you’re swiping songs you aren’t paying for them, and they count each song downloaded as a loss.

But how is allowing a customer to download as many songs as they can for $15.00 a month not losing the RIAA money? If you figure the average person will download 200 songs a month, they’d be paying 3/4 of a cent ($0.075) per song, which is thirteen times less than what someone would pay per song on iTunes ($0.99). Now ponder what the RIAA charged all the people who were caught downloading music.

Some of them had hundreds upon thousands of dollars in fines heaped upon them. Why? Because that’s what it would cost to license the music legally. If you accumulate all the songs in your collection over the course of one year, it’ll cost you a grand total of $180.

Someone’s full of crap here. You decide who.

(source)

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  • http://www.robertkbrown.com/ RKB

    I thought that post was brilliant, too, Vinny, although the milk analogy does stretch it a bit. Just taking a quick look around my house, though, it’s easy to realize how ridiculous the RIAA is when you consider magazine subscriptions. Anybody else got stacks of Time, or Wired, or National Geographic? We subscribe to some different cooking magazines, and have gone back to them several times over the years. Just because we’ve canceled our subscriptions doesn’t mean that we can’t go back and re-read those old magazines.

    Idiots.

  • http://seek-truth.com/ Chet

    The whole RIAA “mp3 file sharing is stealing” campaign has been a farce from the get-go. As we debated in an earlier post of yours, if the RIAA concerns were genuinely for protection of music artists’ intellectual property rights they could’ve nipped this in the bud decades ago when recording music off the radio or copying albums started getting popular.

    They chose not to for obvious reasons, none of which was the protection of the music artists’ intellectual property rights.

    No difference today. :sad:

  • http://www.robertkbrown.com/ RKB

    I thought that post was brilliant, too, Vinny, although the milk analogy does stretch it a bit. Just taking a quick look around my house, though, it’s easy to realize how ridiculous the RIAA is when you consider magazine subscriptions. Anybody else got stacks of Time, or Wired, or National Geographic? We subscribe to some different cooking magazines, and have gone back to them several times over the years. Just because we’ve canceled our subscriptions doesn’t mean that we can’t go back and re-read those old magazines.

    Idiots.

  • http://seek-truth.com/ Chet

    The whole RIAA “mp3 file sharing is stealing” campaign has been a farce from the get-go. As we debated in an earlier post of yours, if the RIAA concerns were genuinely for protection of music artists’ intellectual property rights they could’ve nipped this in the bud decades ago when recording music off the radio or copying albums started getting popular.

    They chose not to for obvious reasons, none of which was the protection of the music artists’ intellectual property rights.

    No difference today. :sad: