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October 09, 2004

Media vs the people

The whole issue of file-swapping reaches a peak as the RIAA and others take the issue of file-swapping to the supreme court.

Hollywood studios and record companies on Friday asked the United States Supreme Court to overturn a controversial series of recent court decisions that have kept file-swapping software legal.

The decisions have been among the biggest setbacks for the entertainment industry in the past several years, as they have tried to quell the rampant exchange of copyrighted materials over peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa and Morpheus.

In a joint petition to the Supreme Court, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said that letting the lower court rulings stand would badly undermine the value of copyrighted work.

This should certainly be interesting - but having seen how ruthlessly the record companies have behaved over the past couple years, it's hard to be sympathetic to them.

Let's not forget how the RIAA companies leased commercial tracks to mp3.com - otherwise a haven for small artists. However, the music giants then each took turns to sue mp3.com - for using the wrong sort of storage system for their tracks.

Once the share price for mp3.com had flattened, Vivendi Universal bought the company out, then spent the next year effectively forcing out the smaller independent musicians - such as myself - to turn mp3.com into a temporary showground for their own signed material - before then closing the place down entirely.

The RIAA has become to the music industry what McCarthyism was to US politics in the 1950's.

Posted by brian_turner at October 9, 2004 09:54 AM

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