RIAA paid its lawyers more than $16,000,000 in 2008 to recover $391,000
Business is great! If by “business” you mean “being in the RIAA lawyering business.”
Not surprised.
The real question is whether the RIAA succeeded in its mission to establish new behavioral norms surrounding music. I feel like it’s less and less acceptable to pirate music, and legitimate streaming and download services simply keep growing. This outcome was probably worth $16,000,000 in attorney fees.
I’ve got my own anti-RIAA biases to contend with here, but it feels to me like ascribing the change in behavioral norms entirely to the RIAA’s legal campaign is a significant reach.
The (relatively small) possibility of being the target of an RIAA lawsuit is certainly a disincentive to sharing music illegally, but I think the bigger nudge to broad patterns of behavior has come from the concessions that the recording industry is making [on digital pricing and global availability, for example] that are making it simpler for us to get legal downloads than illegal.
When it was hard (or impossible) for people to get the music they wanted directly in digital form, it was possible to cast illegal sharing as a sort of noble, Robin Hood-ish pursuit; with the rise of legal download sources (note especially DRM-free sources) with broad and deep catalogues, it’s much, much harder to tell that story.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult for anyone to come up with a coherent argument for out-and-out “piracy” that doesn’t amount to “I don’t want to pay for it,” when even DRM is decreasingly common on legitimate downloads: lest we forget, Amazon’s mp3 store has only been around since the end of 2007, and Apple’s iTunes Plus since the start of 2009.
Whether or not the $391k/$16MM figures hold up to further scrutiny, there’s no question that the recording industry has spent a huge amount of money on lawyers over the past decade or so. I just have to wonder whether behavioral norms would have shifted more quickly had the industry put that money towards actually competing online sooner.
UPDATE: when writing this post, I misunderstood the premise of the original piece—no one’s taking credit for anything here. It’s just a musing about whether or not the change was made thanks to the lawsuits. Humble apologies to anyone I may have misled with this post! That said, please read on for my misinformed thoughts on this:
I love it when big business tries to take credit for shit it has no business taking credit for. This is a great example. Compare the availability of legally downloadable tracks to the ability to illegally download them back in the late 90s early 00s. Now compare them in “modern times.” Yeah, it’s obvious, making music reasonably cheap and easy to get was always the way to go. Likewise, with all other media. If only the industry had embraced this back then, they’d have saved themselves a lot of money and a handful of lawsuit victims a lot less stressed.
The landscape for media is shifting and the part of that landscape that was for music got a head start. Now, the big labels are acting as though they are the “winners” and are trying to write the history books. Of course, the real winner is the consumer. We get to pay for our music and get it easily, pretty much on our terms. No more buying entire albums just to get the good songs. No more paying for packaging. No more clunky discs taking up shelf space. So this is just the recording industry trying to feel good about spending all that money on absurd, unfair lawsuits (not to mention saving face).
Of course, the reality is that illegal downloading will never end. The other reality attached to that reality is that big business will survive anyway—as it already has.
Whiners.
