Following the recent article by Hilary Rosen that the RIAA lawsuits are no longer effective, the CEO of the RIAA has announced that they have succeeded in containing the illegal sharing of copyrighted music. While the problem is still there, its growth has flattened out. Since the original Napster started in 1999, the sales of CDs fell by up to 30% as file sharing continued to rapidly climb. However, file sharing only grew from 8.7 million people online on average May 2005 to around 10 million this May.
The RIAA goes on to mention that since the Supreme court ruled that file sharing service operators can be held liable for its user's actions, the RIAA sent cease and desist letters to various file sharing companies with several successfully shut down or planning to change to a legitimate version. So far, they have had little success in dealing with BitTorrent based sites.
As their lawsuit campaign goes on, the RIAA has sued over 18,000 individuals who illegally shared music online to date, with 4,500 settlements made for around $4,000 per settlement on average. While the sales of albums fell around 3% this year, digital sales are still booming with a 77% increase. Finally, the RIAA is still in the process of suing XM Satellite Radio for making available a handheld satellite radio receiver capable of recording songs, claiming that XM has not licensed its music for downloading.
|
That's an optimistic view from an industry that saw its numbers slide to near oblivion after the launch of the original Napster in 1999. CD sales fell as much as 30%, and the RIAA pressed Congress and the courts for relief against what it said was rampant piracy. After the Supreme Court ruled that the services could be liable for piracy by their users, the RIAA sent cease-and-desist letters to several firms. Most '” including BearShare, WinMX and Grokster '” shut down. EDonkey and others said they would switch to a licensed, paid model. The full article can be read here. |
Even though file sharing may have flattened out, these figures do not take into account consumers who physically exchange music with each other and potentially other methods of obtaining music, such as binary Usenet groups and the various Russian music services operating through Russia's legal loophole.
It is interesting to see how the RIAA is suing XM radio
for offering receivers capable of recording music, yet radio cassette recorders
capable of recording music off the airwaves never caused any significant issue, at least not in the past few decades. Also the portable XM radio with recording capabilities does not offer the ability to transfer music to other equipment, unlike cassette recorders where tapes can easily be copied, which means that it seems strange that the RIAA is now strongly against digital satellite radio recorders. Even most MP3 players with FM Radio offer the ability to record off the radio and transfer recordings to the PC and while they do not split up the tracks, virtually any good audio editing software can help the user to split up recordings into individual songs.
Source: USA TODAY
