EFF: the RIAA Must Admit Failure and Adopt a Different Strategy

The EFF thought was about time to lay the matter of how effective was the RIAA after all out on the table. This happened in a new report released Wednesday in which the Electronic Frontier Foundation comes forward with some public (justified) questions about the RIAA's proceedings "Has the arbitrary singling out of nearly 30,000 random American families helped promote public respect for copyright law?" and "Have the lawsuits put the P2P genie back in the bottle or restored the record industry to its 1997 revenues?"

Overall, the methods the RIAA has used so far have turned eventually against it and the recording industry.

The first moved was to sue technology providers which only led to more people finding out about file sharing. Taking Napster down, for example, only meant the emergence of other better similar services. This made the RIAA change its approach and soon the individuals were the ones to get sued in the name of an "education campaign" aiming at teaching the Internet users that sharing copyright content was illegal. The RIAA became soon one of the most “adulated” organizations in the world.

Going over the EFF's recap, it may leave you with a strong feeling that the 30,000 legal threats issued up to now were in the main directed against laid-off, single-parent, disabled veterans of a certain age charged of downloading hard-core rap music using Windows-only P2P software when the only computer they own is a Mac. And let’s not forget about some dead infringers.

Considering that the existing approach is not delivering the expected results, the EFF proposes "A Better Way Forward". In the document, the group describes an approach it has been talking up on the conference circuit for years, namely, voluntary collective licensing.

This proposal has appealed to some artists like Barenaked Ladies but the recording labels don’t look so thrilled with the idea. The solution is, basically, this - Internet users could buy a license similarly to the way the radio stations pay for the right to play any songs they want. In the EFF’s vision there would be a fee of $5-10 per month paid to a new collecting society and distributed to artists and labels, for which consumers would be allowed to download whatever they want, however they want.

In conclusion – is there anyone (apart from the record companies) not sure about the failure of this approach? The whole strategy was so planned as to suck more money out of people using threats and intimidation. While the EFF's offered solution will be turned both sides, these five years of copyright infringement history certainly brought some doubts about the whole campaign, and poped out the question - why would anyone believe this has actually got something to do with the interest of the artists and the attempt of helping them.