RIAA says its legal crusade is pointless

Written by Tim Smalley

July 24, 2007 | 13:02

Tags: #american #campaign #crusade #downloading #harvard #industry #internet #jonathan #law #legal #music #piracy #pirates #prevention #recording #us

Companies: #riaa

The RIAA has admitted that its legal crusade against music pirates is “not the answer” to the piracy problem.

Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the RIAA told TG Daily that “litigation tends to generate more heat, friction, and headlines.” Instead, Lamy feels that a better way to tackle the piracy problem is aggressive licensing and offering legal alternatives, but he said that the lawsuits were “a necessary part of the larger equation.”

When the RIAA’s campaign started in April 2003, the company claims that there were around 6.9 million US households that illegally downloaded music. That figure now stands at over 7.8 million based on data collected by the RIAA in March 2007.

Broadband penetration in the US has more than doubled since the initial data was collected, but it’s still questionable whether the campaign has had a telling effect on piracy prevention.

John Palfrey, a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School and executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, shared his feelings on the matter with TG Daily.

He feels that the RIAA’s legal crusade hasn’t made a meaningful dent on young American people’s (illegal) downloading habits, claiming that it represented a signal that the recording industry is out of step with both the present and the future. “But it is more importantly, I think, a distraction from finding the way forward in a digital age,” he claimed.

I think most would agree with Lamy's acknowledgement, but the fact that the RIAA still feels the need to continue down a path that even it feels is "not the answer" is quite frankly bizarre - where do they get these people from? You can, of course, vent in the usual place.
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