Editorial: Losing the beat
The RIAA's dubious ethics create problems in the industry

February 21, 2007

“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

So reads the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. While it does not specifically state it, the Fifth Amendment has generally been accepted by U.S. courts to classify those accused of crimes as “innocent until proven guilty.” In the case of illegal downloading, however, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has chosen to ignore the Fifth Amendment in favor of blindly suing people whom it feels have harmed the recording industry. RIAA’s logic behind these lawsuits has been that illegal downloading has had a drastic impact on the record industry, and that examples must be made of key offenders. The organization has gone on to make fraudulent claims about piracy’s effect on the music industry, but, recently, RIAA’s shady dealings have slowly been exposed.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in 1990 to confront conflicts between individuals’ rights and digital technology, RIAA has sued 20,000 people whom it believes to be illegal downloaders. Only 2,000 of these cases have been settled and many have turned out to be poorly researched. For example, in 2005 there was RIAA’s case against Gertrude Walton, an 83-year-old woman the RIAA subpoenaed for illegal downloading. Walton, though, had been dead since 2004. A similar media fiasco occurred in 2003, when RIAA sued 66-year-old Sarah Seabury Ward for sharing over 2,000 songs on the Internet. Ward, though, could barely operate a computer, let alone navigate the peer-to-peer networks used for file sharing.

In December 2006, Judge David G. Trager set a precedent for RIAA’s lawsuits by ruling in the case of UMG v. Lindor that “plaintiffs will have the burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that defendant did indeed infringe plaintiff’s copyrights by convincing the fact-finder, based on the evidence plaintiffs have gathered, that defendant actually shared sound files belonging to plaintiffs (ARS Technica, Dec. 22, 2006).” Thus, Trager reasserted the importance of “innocent until proven guilty.” Further, in January 2007, Robert Santangelo filed a countersuit against RIAA for defamation, violating anti-trust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats. Elektra Records, the label suing and being sued by Santangelo, has since made a request for the case to be dismissed, but to no avail.

In December 2006, The Hollywood Reporter broke a story saying the RIAA petitioned the panel of federal government Copyright Royalty Judges to reduce the royalty rates paid to artists and their publishers for digital recordings. Such a petition is antithetical to the interests which RIAA has been claiming to defend, especially given the organization’s zealous attempts to control digital music since 2000. This, coupled with the organization’s incessant claims of representing record labels who themselves do not want to be represented by RIAA, such as the punk label Fat Wreck Chords, makes RIAA seem all the more sinister.

The biggest blow to RIAA’s case, however, came last week, when the Journal of Political Economy published a survey that analyzed illegal downloading’s effects on record sales during the last four months of 2002. The data sample used by the publication included somewhere around 1.75 million songs and 680 albums. The RIAA claims that Internet piracy has caused profits and sales to plummet by 10 percent, and yet, the Journal of Political Economy’s data indicates that illegal downloading during the last four months of 2002 hurt record sales by a scant 0.7 percent. Further, the highest selling artists were also the most heavily downloaded, but not so much that those artists’ sales were hurt substantially.

The Journal of Political Economy went on to say, “Using detailed records of transfers of digital music files, we find that file sharing has had no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample. Even our most negative point estimate implies that a one-standard-deviation increase in file sharing reduces an album’s weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero.”

The Collegian’s response to RIAA is an unabashed call to sense. The association does not support music any more than Internet pirates do. It ought to drop all of the lawsuits and develop a new approach to stop illegal downloading. Consider dropping album prices from the average $20 to $10. There was a point when records were actually less than $10, and, somehow, the industry was able to thrive on such meager earnings. Also, consider that part of the reason why industry sales have dropped by 10 percent isn’t because of downloading: it’s because there are no artists big enough to dominate the market completely. Part of the reason why the late ’90s were so profitable was because everything, in a generalized sense, boiled down to teeny bop or nu-metal. The new millennium has seen a huge diversification; an artist can pack a venue as big as The Electric Factory without major label, television or radio support and live a wealthy, comfortable life.

Finally, the RIAA ought to consider reviewing the old music business model, where profits depend on one huge-selling release to justify hundreds of lackluster ones. The Internet has allowed audiophiles to embrace thousands of different genre niches; the recording industry should do the same. Choose art over soullessness.