The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a non-profit organisation of music industry interests. They are the trade group that represents the U.S recording industry. Their members are the record companies that comprise the most vibrant national music industry in the world (RIAA, 2004). Their mission is to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes their members creative and financial vitality (RIAA, 2004). The RIAA’s goals are to work with their industry and others to enable technologies that open up new opportunities, while at the same time protecting the rights of artists and copyright holders.
However the biggest issue that faces the RIAA is copyright in the music industry.
Wade (2004, p.12) says the RIAA estimates that 2.6 billion copyrighted files are illegally downloaded each month, and that at any given time there are over 5 million users online sharing an estimated one billion files. As sales and profit margins began to slide more and more each year, the music industry decided to take action. Wade (2004, p.12) says most major labels, along with the RIAA, are now proactively doing everything they can to squash this problem before the problem squashes them. “We simply cannot allow online piracy to continue destroying the livelihoods of artists, musicians, songwriters, retailers and everyone in the music industry,� says RIAA President Gary Sherman (in Wade, 2004, p.12).
Flew (2004, p.108) said the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) responded quickly, filing a suit against Napster Inc., the operators of Napster.com in early 2000, arguing that Napster has violated copyright laws, and was similar to a giant online pirate bazaar. The RIAA won the legal battle, however even the RIAA legal victory over Napster cannot put the peer-to-peer technology genie back into the bottle (Langenderfer and Cook, 2001, p.288). The RIAA victory may also spell legal doom for other centrally based peer-to-peer sites such as Napster, but Napster successors such as Gnutella, Freenet, and KaZaA are not similarly oriented, in that they lack any central server (Langenderfer and Cook, 2001, p. 288). The truth is, virtually all recorded music has already been converted into unencrypted mp3s and will still be available with or without Napster.
References
Flew, T. (2004) New Media: An Introduction, Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Langenderfer, J. and Cook, D. (2001) “Copyright policies and issues raised by A&M Records v. Napster: the shot heard round the word or not with a bang but a whimper?,� Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, vol.20, iss.2, pp.280-289.
Recording Industry Association of America (2004) “Issues: Copyright,� retrieved October 14, 2004, from http://www.riaa.com/issues/copyright/default.asp
Recording Industry Association of America (2004) “Press Room,� retrieved October 14, 2004, from http://www.riaa.com/news/newsletter/021904.asp
Wade, J. (2004) “The music industry’s war on piracy,� Risk Management, vol.51, iss.2, pp.10-17.
Julie Bui 16:02, 28 Oct 2004 (EST)
