arstechnica.com — Both the plaintiffs and defendants rested their cases after the judge in Capitol v. Thomas refused to allow RIAA president Cary Sherman to testify. Defendant Jammie Thomas also testified that the KaZaA share observed by Media Sentry did not belong to her.
Oct 3, 2007 View in Crawl 4
pa42Oct 4, 2007
If I could clone a BMW it would effect the seller of BMW's. It's 1 less potential customer and it lowers the combined value of the property. When you download a copy of a song, the combined value of the IP (the music) goes down. The more people who get it free, the lower the value of the IP. If you wrote a book and people were copying the pages from the book because they wanted to read it, but weren't paying you for it, you'd be really pissed off. The copyright owner is right to be pissed off here.
pa42Oct 4, 2007
@ Honored: You'll notice this isn't who the industry sues, they sue people who either are distributing the music or downloading it without buying it. They may feel that you can't rip your CD, but this is not grounds for their lawsuits.
weaksnycOct 4, 2007
In response to PA42... I agree with your value argument. Unfortunately, as value decreases, prices should decrease... except in the case of the music industry, where price continue to increase, and for no sound reason. Dropping prices would mean smaller profit PER SALE, but that's the nature of business. When value/demand decreases, you lower your prices to stay competitive, or you're driven out of business. For example, I personally don't think $20 for a CD is fair, which keeps me out of CD stores, which means I make less impulse buys, etc etc... No matter how you look at it, the RIAA are not being smart about anything, and they've driven a wedge between themselves and their customers.
amsterdamordethOct 4, 2007
It may be to late for them to successfully profit AND steer people away from 10 years of free music. 10 Years ago I would have taken napster's user base and started with a very, very cheap monthly rate for unlimited music in lower quality, and a higher rate for increased quality music. You make a little money off of people wanting 128kbit music, and more off of higher quality tracks. In a year, slightly raise the price a little. Every consecutive year you slowly tweak monthly pricing to see what people will accept before feeling like they are being ripped off. As I said though, it is probably to late for this because now they have major stores like walmart and target controlling prices, not the RIAA.Look at allofmp3.com. It was the perfect alternative and people ate it up. Until it got squashed.
goldfisheyOct 6, 2007
@ PA42 : I wasnt trying to believe she was guilty, Simply, I believe that just because you have good evidence to level at someone, doesnt mean you can give undue weight to flawed evidence. My comment disputing the crime definition was out of place - since it referred to comments made by Sony, and not to the court in question. And yes the radiohead model works because they are popular -which raises 2 questions:1. Will other popular bands follow suit and 2. What will be the RIAA reaction to this?