The second was an announcement from Studio 2 about their show tonight including a segment called "Music Industry Woes".
The Studio 2 announcement goes as follows:
- Music Industry Woes
- Napster may be dead, but thanks to Gnutella and Morpheus and a host of
other file 'sharing' programs, the downloading of copyrighted material off
the Internet is alive and well. Video killed the radio star, will the
Internet kill the record companies?
Producer: Kaly Vittala
What frustrates me about the Studio 2 introduction is that while I agree with the record companies that their revenues have went down recently, their analysis of the numbers are fundamentally flawed. Their revenues have gone down because they have started an assault on music fans with their lawsuits against peer-to-peer file sharing.
There is no way for the recording industry to tell the difference between lost revenue to people who are sharing big-label music on the Internet, or people like myself who have simply decided to boycott the big-labels.
In April of 2000 I sent out my article, "Bye, Metallica: a lost fan", and created the URL of http://metallica.flora.org/. I wrote that URL onto all the Metallica CD's I owned, and brought to a used CD store. As of that day I have boycott the products of any RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) or MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) member.
I made one exception last summer when I bought two DVD movies. In this case I bought the movies with the specific intent of playing them on my Linux computer using an Open-Source DVD player. I knew that this was in direct violation of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a controversial law in the USA) and I submitted details of this action to the Canadian Government's copyright reform process as a reply to the Canadian Motion Pictures Distributors Association (CMPDA) submission.
I do believe that revenue is being lost by these media cartels, and I am doing my part to help ensure that this continues to happen. These cartels will continue to claim that it is peer-to-peer networking that is bringing them down. I suspect that the Candle Production Association of our distant past also attempted to blame the invention of the light-bulb on their financial woes, and wished that they could have enacted laws to stop it.
See also: BoyCott-RIAA.com