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For me the best part of this article is the final subhead: > RIAA Efforts Backfire Basically every story written about RIAA since the Clinton administration :

For me the best part of this article is the final subhead: > RIAA Efforts Backfire Basically every story written about RIAA since the Clinton administration :-)

benologist 6y ago
About 400 million people pay monthly for access to music instead of listening to radio, occasionally buying albums or piracy so idk if anything really backfired...
- Qub3d 6y ago
  I would argue this happened in spite of their efforts. The music industry was dragged kicking and screaming into the streaming world for a variety of reasons, among them the fact that with centralized platforms, artists have no reason to use labels for "discovery" purposes any longer. Its long been known that the way to defeat piracy is to offer a better service. Its what Steam did, its what Netflix did. Ironically, the fragmentation of those ecosystems is bringing it back. Piracy is the ultimate invisible hand on the entertainment distribution industry.
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    Labels were never about discovery. They were about promotion, production, and all of the expensive stuff you need at scale. For example, Justin Beiber, Lorde, Billie Eilish, Lil Nas X, were all discovered independently due to their own efforts and had decent success on their own. (Farther back in time, the Beatles and most classic rock bands similarly got signed to labels after demonstrating success.) But they're all signed to major labels now, because touring is expensive, and the scale of exposure you get with a label is very different from what you get on your own, and the income correspondingly increases as well. In many (but not all) cases, the artists usually also get lump-sum advances against new albums or singles which removes the financial risks for creating new music. Piracy was never about discovery. It was simply about people being too cheap to pay for other people's work. Sometimes, as with Adobe and Microsoft, they were okay with it because that just locked in their market dominance and created more future customers. But for fad-driven and taste-driven industries, privacy has a notable impact on creator's earnings.
    - depressedpanda 6y ago
      > But for fad-driven and taste-driven industries, privacy [sic] has a notable impact on creator's earnings. Do you have any data that doesn't make the ridiculous and false assertion that 1 download = 1 lost sale, with which to back that claim? Because from what I've read, piracy has the opposite effect.
      - gamblor956 6y ago
        I'm not claiming that 1 download = 1 lost sale. But it's well-documented that piracy negatively affects music, film, and game studio income. See, e.g., https://www.ipi.org/ipi_issues/detail/the-true-cost-of-sound-recording-piracy-to-the-us-economy https://www.ipi.org/ipi_issues/detail/the-true-cost-of-sound... Piracy may the opposite effect for software but it definitely has a negative effect on entertainment related IP.
        jcranmer 6y ago
        If you read the fine print in that study, it is concluding the cost of the piracy purely in terms of 1 download = 0.2 lost sale. There's not even a discussion of the potential word-of-mouth effects or later sale generation potentials for pirated music.
        benologist 6y ago
        What if they lied about how much music was worth though? You can stream 10,000+ songs in one month for the price of one album today, in the early 2000s we were asked to believe that was $10,000+ worth of music and their suffering was relative to that...
        nitrogen 6y ago
        Piracy may the opposite effect for software but it definitely has a negative effect on entertainment related IP. High school events where I grew up were basically an iMac with the student body officers' MP3 collections and a PA system. All the pirated MP3s people were playing at those various official and unofficial gatherings of my youth led to me buying CDs once I had money of my own. Has a non-industry-affiliated research group produced causal data (not just declining sales figures) showing that noncommercial entertainment piracy is a net harm?
  - smolder 6y ago
    The commercial streaming solutions are only going to be good until they're the only game in town. Commercial entities don't simply build good things and leave them intact for people to benefit from with no profit motive. Once the leverage is there, there will be abusive monetization, consumers will be treated like crap, until perhaps some breaking point where it can be disrupted. How would streaming become the only game in town? Piracy and any other online mischief are being stamped out the hard way, by taking control of our technology from us. Approved operating system, approved drivers, approved software, approved browser, approved websites, no piracy, no privacy, no deviance.
cookiecaper 6y ago
Whatever the public perception is, they did indeed get Napster et al offline, which I think is the thing they cared about. Not sure that they interpret the Streisand Effect in the conventional way. If anything, temporary increase in usage of targeted tools helps them make the case that they're being harmed by said tools' existence.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Yes, that's the thing a lot of techies have glossed over. The increased usage of youtube-dl since the takedown letter was sent makes the RIAA's case stronger if the RIAA takes this to court. (It's not as apparent on HN where people have been bringing up their (mostly) fair uses, but on Reddit and other forums, people have been proudly proclaiming how they just downloaded youtube-dl and began downloading music videos from YouTube.) Ironically, by using youtube-dl en masse to "stick it to the RIAA" they may have inadvertently dug its grave instead.
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    YouTube makes these videos freely available. Downloading / recording them is in no way illegal.
- Darkphibre 6y ago
  I'm still annoyed at the ruling against mp3.com. They created a hash of the physical CD-ROM, and if it matched one that was already in their cloud they wouldn't actually rip the contents for your own personal copy of the exact same bits. It was tantamount to ZFS deduplication being outlawed. Reminds me of What color are your bits: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23.
throwaway2048 6y ago
The RIAA has been wildly successful, they exist as a body to take all the bad press for consumer hostile moves like this instead of companies like Sony, Universal, Disney and Warner, who are the companies who actually operate the RIAA. Nobody at the RIAA cares you are angry about their moves, in fact they are likely glad that you are, and not the actual responsible parties.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  Precisely. The RIAA (along with the other copyright Associations of America) is a front to suck up bad publicity. In this case, I would not be surprised if Google was ultimately driving the push to get rid of youtube-dl using the RIAA as a proxy, both for PR purposes and because the RIAA has a semi-plausible claim to legal standing. Youtube has ramped up its consumer abuse policies lately, such as the begging screen that demands unauthenticated users log in and requires four clicks to dismiss, and it would not be even remotely surprising if Google is also working to get rid of tools that allow people to watch YouTube videos without being subjected to advertising abuse.

For me the best part of this article is the final subhead: > RIAA Efforts Backfire Basically every story written about RIAA since the Clinton administration :-)

benologist 6y ago

About 400 million people pay monthly for access to music instead of listening to radio, occasionally buying albums or piracy so idk if anything really backfired...

Qub3d 6y ago
I would argue this happened in spite of their efforts. The music industry was dragged kicking and screaming into the streaming world for a variety of reasons, among them the fact that with centralized platforms, artists have no reason to use labels for "discovery" purposes any longer. Its long been known that the way to defeat piracy is to offer a better service. Its what Steam did, its what Netflix did. Ironically, the fragmentation of those ecosystems is bringing it back. Piracy is the ultimate invisible hand on the entertainment distribution industry.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Labels were never about discovery. They were about promotion, production, and all of the expensive stuff you need at scale. For example, Justin Beiber, Lorde, Billie Eilish, Lil Nas X, were all discovered independently due to their own efforts and had decent success on their own. (Farther back in time, the Beatles and most classic rock bands similarly got signed to labels after demonstrating success.) But they're all signed to major labels now, because touring is expensive, and the scale of exposure you get with a label is very different from what you get on your own, and the income correspondingly increases as well. In many (but not all) cases, the artists usually also get lump-sum advances against new albums or singles which removes the financial risks for creating new music. Piracy was never about discovery. It was simply about people being too cheap to pay for other people's work. Sometimes, as with Adobe and Microsoft, they were okay with it because that just locked in their market dominance and created more future customers. But for fad-driven and taste-driven industries, privacy has a notable impact on creator's earnings.
  - depressedpanda 6y ago
    > But for fad-driven and taste-driven industries, privacy [sic] has a notable impact on creator's earnings. Do you have any data that doesn't make the ridiculous and false assertion that 1 download = 1 lost sale, with which to back that claim? Because from what I've read, piracy has the opposite effect.
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      I'm not claiming that 1 download = 1 lost sale. But it's well-documented that piracy negatively affects music, film, and game studio income. See, e.g., https://www.ipi.org/ipi_issues/detail/the-true-cost-of-sound-recording-piracy-to-the-us-economy https://www.ipi.org/ipi_issues/detail/the-true-cost-of-sound... Piracy may the opposite effect for software but it definitely has a negative effect on entertainment related IP.
      - jcranmer 6y ago
        If you read the fine print in that study, it is concluding the cost of the piracy purely in terms of 1 download = 0.2 lost sale. There's not even a discussion of the potential word-of-mouth effects or later sale generation potentials for pirated music.
      - benologist 6y ago
        What if they lied about how much music was worth though? You can stream 10,000+ songs in one month for the price of one album today, in the early 2000s we were asked to believe that was $10,000+ worth of music and their suffering was relative to that...
      - nitrogen 6y ago
        Piracy may the opposite effect for software but it definitely has a negative effect on entertainment related IP. High school events where I grew up were basically an iMac with the student body officers' MP3 collections and a PA system. All the pirated MP3s people were playing at those various official and unofficial gatherings of my youth led to me buying CDs once I had money of my own. Has a non-industry-affiliated research group produced causal data (not just declining sales figures) showing that noncommercial entertainment piracy is a net harm?
- smolder 6y ago
  The commercial streaming solutions are only going to be good until they're the only game in town. Commercial entities don't simply build good things and leave them intact for people to benefit from with no profit motive. Once the leverage is there, there will be abusive monetization, consumers will be treated like crap, until perhaps some breaking point where it can be disrupted. How would streaming become the only game in town? Piracy and any other online mischief are being stamped out the hard way, by taking control of our technology from us. Approved operating system, approved drivers, approved software, approved browser, approved websites, no piracy, no privacy, no deviance.

cookiecaper 6y ago

Whatever the public perception is, they did indeed get Napster et al offline, which I think is the thing they cared about. Not sure that they interpret the Streisand Effect in the conventional way. If anything, temporary increase in usage of targeted tools helps them make the case that they're being harmed by said tools' existence.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gamblor956 6y ago
Yes, that's the thing a lot of techies have glossed over. The increased usage of youtube-dl since the takedown letter was sent makes the RIAA's case stronger if the RIAA takes this to court. (It's not as apparent on HN where people have been bringing up their (mostly) fair uses, but on Reddit and other forums, people have been proudly proclaiming how they just downloaded youtube-dl and began downloading music videos from YouTube.) Ironically, by using youtube-dl en masse to "stick it to the RIAA" they may have inadvertently dug its grave instead.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  YouTube makes these videos freely available. Downloading / recording them is in no way illegal.
Darkphibre 6y ago
I'm still annoyed at the ruling against mp3.com. They created a hash of the physical CD-ROM, and if it matched one that was already in their cloud they wouldn't actually rip the contents for your own personal copy of the exact same bits. It was tantamount to ZFS deduplication being outlawed. Reminds me of What color are your bits: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23.

throwaway2048 6y ago

The RIAA has been wildly successful, they exist as a body to take all the bad press for consumer hostile moves like this instead of companies like Sony, Universal, Disney and Warner, who are the companies who actually operate the RIAA. Nobody at the RIAA cares you are angry about their moves, in fact they are likely glad that you are, and not the actual responsible parties.

bleepblorp 6y ago
Precisely. The RIAA (along with the other copyright Associations of America) is a front to suck up bad publicity. In this case, I would not be surprised if Google was ultimately driving the push to get rid of youtube-dl using the RIAA as a proxy, both for PR purposes and because the RIAA has a semi-plausible claim to legal standing. Youtube has ramped up its consumer abuse policies lately, such as the begging screen that demands unauthenticated users log in and requires four clicks to dismiss, and it would not be even remotely surprising if Google is also working to get rid of tools that allow people to watch YouTube videos without being subjected to advertising abuse.