Ha ha ha ha ha. RIAA paid its lawyers more than $1

yeah that is good business ..........

Ha ha ha ha ha. RIAA paid its lawyers more than $16,000,000 in 2008 to recover only $391,000!!!

So all in all, for a 3 year period, they spent around $64,000,000 in legal and investigative expenses to recover around $1,361,000.

Shrewd.

but i guess legal fees are an exp3ense write off .......

[Mongo53]

Well, RIAA would argue they could have lost more than $64M if they did NOT make a stand againt music piracy. I think that was the objective, NOT to recover what they may have lost, but to prevent future loss by getting people to stop and shut down those making it really easy to do it.

Yea, I would agree that RIAA was awfully short sighted and reactionary, against their potential and current customers. If they hadn't ignored the customers expectations completely with their anti-piracy stance and worked toward more reasonable and balanced solutions, with a little innovation, everybody would have been a lot happier and could have avoided all the mess over the last few years.

I think the next fight is the TV providers and content providers, with their digital transition. They are working to lockup the service so that you have to pay for every individual TV for every single program, you can only use their provided solutions for recording and rewatching later. They argue to prevent piracy, forget that they have massive new revenue streams coming from all the fleet of old refurbished equipment they are now renting to customers for the same price as finiancing new more capable equipment.

The TV service and content providers could have worked a better balanced solution between customer satisfaction and anti-piracy. Some simple technical innovations could have easily solved this and satisfied everyone.

I hate to be a cynic, but it certainly appears the service providers developed the business plan in the light of "How can we get more money out of the Customer" instead of "How can we Satisfy the Customer Better". The lack of competition in the industry will let them get away with it, since a large majority of their customer do NOT have a competitor to turn too, and the few that do, the competitor only offers the same solutions.

[Larry Gude (Premo)]

Originally Posted by Mongo53

Well, RIAA would argue they could have lost more than $64M if they did NOT make a stand againt music piracy. I think that was the objective, NOT to recover what they may have lost, but to prevent future loss by getting people to stop and shut down those making it really easy to do it.

Nothing to add. Well done.

[Mongo53]

I borrowed my neighbors chainsaw and Socket Wrench set the other day, to do some work around the house and yard. Am I guilty of Tool Piracy?

An executive at Stanely Tool, runs a few numbers and realizes that if all their potential customers had to purchase their tools if they need to use them, instead of borrow them from friends and neighbors, they increase earnings by 25%. So, he gets his legal team and lobbyist in Washinton to go to work, and get new laws passed so that borrowing tools is illegal and they start to make examples out of people that they can catch doing it. Tool Piracy hurts honest companies trying to sell tools.

No, its NOT a fair analogy with Music Piracy, BUT its an example of how far things can go if companies ignore their customers expectations and reasonable use of their products, and NOT accept what would be a fair balance between the company and customers rights in the transaction. Through in the ineffective government that works harder for campaign contributions and insider cronnyism than what is fair and right, and this stuff happens.

I think you are seeing that now with the TV service/content providers, Music Piracy, the stealing of the music was wrong, but the reaction from RIAA was dumb, they could have focused on innovating with technology and trying to balance their rights with the customers, instead of trying to eliminate what will never be trully elminated.

[Larry Gude (Premo)]

Originally Posted by Mongo53

I borrowed my neighbors chainsaw and Socket Wrench set the other day, to do some work around the house and yard. Am I guilty of Tool Piracy?

An executive at Stanely Tool, runs a few numbers and realizes that if all their potential customers had to purchase their tools if they need to use them, instead of borrow them from friends and neighbors, they increase earnings by 25%. So, he gets his legal team and lobbyist in Washinton to go to work, and get new laws passed so that borrowing tools is illegal and they start to make examples out of people that they can catch doing it. Tool Piracy hurts honest companies trying to sell tools.

No, its NOT a fair analogy with Music Piracy, BUT its an example of how far things can go if companies ignore their customers expectations and reasonable use of their products, and NOT accept what would be a fair balance between the company and customers rights in the transaction. Through in the ineffective government that works harder for campaign contributions and insider cronnyism than what is fair and right, and this stuff happens.

I think you are seeing that now with the TV service/content providers, Music Piracy, the stealing of the music was wrong, but the reaction from RIAA was dumb, they could have focused on innovating with technology and trying to balance their rights with the customers, instead of trying to eliminate what will never be trully elminated.

What was good is now not so good.

To compare to a chain saw, we're talking about someone taking a chainsaw from the store, not paying for it, and lending it to anyone who comes up to the store. Music piracy was not just one person buying a song and then sharing it only with a friend or two.

[GWguy]

Originally Posted by Mongo53

I think you are seeing that now with the TV service/content providers, Music Piracy, the stealing of the music was wrong, but the reaction from RIAA was dumb, they could have focused on innovating with technology and trying to balance their rights with the customers, instead of trying to eliminate what will never be trully elminated.

I think a few have tried that (SONY comes to mind...), and the copy protections schemes either caused more problems than it was worth or was broken by the "customers". The techno route didn't go over so well.....

Oh, BTW..... got a 9/16" double ended box wrench I can borrow?

[GWguy]

OH, and regarding the tool scenario.... as a result of someone not wanting to buy a tool, tool rental shops opened up. They buy it, you rent it from them. No money goes back to the manufacturer.

DVDs are the same now, you get a NetFlix subscription or goto Blockbusters. A portion of the rental goes back to the film owners.

Not looking for arguments, just an observation.

[Mongo53]

Originally Posted by GWguy

OH, and regarding the tool scenario.... as a result of someone not wanting to buy a tool, tool rental shops opened up. They buy it, you rent it from them. No money goes back to the manufacturer.

DVDs are the same now, you get a NetFlix subscription or goto Blockbusters. A portion of the rental goes back to the film owners.

Not looking for arguments, just an observation.

And now music has services like Netflix, pay monthly fees to log into the service and play what ever music you want as often as you want. I.e. you don't buy the music, you kind of rent it and its always available to you.

Originally Posted by GWguy

I think a few have tried that (SONY comes to mind...), and the copy protections schemes either caused more problems than it was worth or was broken by the "customers". The techno route didn't go over so well.....

That is probably more likely because it was from SONY, NOT that the solution was bad. No NOT saying SONY is poor quality, saying SONY is one of the bigger offenders in the industry when it comes to trying to create or insert an advantage for themselves and/or try to corner the market.

Without a doubt, security for the company does create some problems for the customer. Thats my point about there being a balance or compromise between the rights of the business and the customer. Each gets benifits and sometimes a little bit screwed, instead of one getting all the benefits and the other gets totally screwed. I would rather put up with some of the inconvience from the security than go the other way, where there are ridculous proprietary and locked systems, like what cable TV service is turning into now.

As I said before, the tool scenario is NOT a fair analogy for what happened with music, I was trying to make the point companies can take the concept too far, there needs to be a reasonable compromise of fair usage and payment between both parties. Customers have to put up with some reasonable security measures, the company has to realize there will always be some theft no matter what they do, they can't screw over their good customers trying to punish others that are stealing.

Its getting like this with TV service now that it is going digital. The excuses for anti-piracy are pretty weak IMO, it seems more a scheme to get customers to pay more for the same service.

It would never fly if there was real competition in the Industry. If I could connect my TV and Recorders into the COAX connector on the wall and use my TV and Recorder just like they were intended to be used, I would be their customer today, would anyone here NOT switch to that service as well?

Yes, a few areas have a choice, but its too small of a segment for any company to change its strategy, so your choice is still between 2 or even 3 companies that all went the same route of making their system proprietary with schemes of forcing/enticing the customer into spending more.

best ever reason to give something away on the internet ....

there is alot more meat @ the link 17500 words total

Introducing the Baen Free Library
by Eric Flint

Baen Books is now making available — for free — a number of its titles in electronic format. We're calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online — no conditions, no strings attached. (Later we may ask for an extremely simple, name & email only, registration. ) Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed. )

Why are we doing this? Well, for two reasons.

The first is what you might call a "matter of principle." This all started as a byproduct of an online "virtual brawl" I got into with a number of people, some of them professional SF authors, over the issue of online piracy of copyrighted works and what to do about it.

There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was with handcuffs and brass knucks. Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences!

Alles in ordnung!

I, ah, disagreed. Rather vociferously and belligerently, in fact. And I can be a vociferous and belligerent fellow. My own opinion, summarized briefly, is as follows:

1. Online piracy — while it is definitely illegal and immoral — is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.

2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.

3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market — especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people — is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.

In the course of this debate, I mentioned it to my publisher Jim Baen. He more or less virtually snorted and expressed the opinion that if one of his authors — how about you, Eric? — were willing to put up a book for free online that the resulting publicity would more than offset any losses the author might suffer.

The minute he made the proposal, I realized he was right. After all, Dave Weber's On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a "loss leader" for Baen's for-pay experiment "Webscriptions" for months now. And — hey, whaddaya know? — over that time it's become Baen's most popular backlist title in paper!

And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.

Sure enough, within a day, I received at least half a dozen messages (some posted in public forums, others by private email) from people who told me that, based on hearing about the episode and checking out Mother of Demons, they either had or intended to buy the book. In one or two cases, this was a "gesture of solidarity. "But in most instances, it was because people preferred to read something they liked in a print version and weren't worried about the small cost — once they saw, through sampling it online, that it was a novel they enjoyed. (Mother of Demons is a $5.99 paperback, available in most bookstores. Yes, that a plug. )

Then, after thinking the whole issue through a bit more, I realized that by posting Mother of Demons I was just making a gesture. Gestures are fine, but policies are better.

So, the next day, I discussed the matter with Jim again and it turned out he felt exactly the same way. So I proposed turning the Mother of Demons tour-de-force into an ongoing project. Immediately, David Drake was brought into the discussion and the three of us refined the idea and modified it here and there. And then Dave Weber heard about it, and Dave Freer, and. . . voila.

The Baen Free Library was born.