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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Depending on the artist and label it's a giant question mark whether the label has any hand in the live performances or tours. Touring has always been expensive (and lucrative), but the agencies that deal with it traditionally haven't been labels.
The traditional business model of a record label is almost entirely obsolete, and they need new revenue streams. That said, the people who run these businesses are antithetical to innovation and creativity in business and that's why industry groups like the RIAA exist in the first place.
If you look at a graph of music industry revenue, it peaks in 2000, collapses until 2015 (at ½-⅓ its peak value), and has been on a strong uptick since then. Peak apoplexy about the impact of piracy was around 2005, and there was a strong desire to tie the collapse in revenue directly to piracy.
From what I can tell, most of the studies establishing a clear economic cost to piracy tend to rely on numbers originating from the music industry without clear attribution to data, or by naïve analyses estimating that 1 download = X lost sales, without considering effects like budgetary limits (I'll spend at most $X on entertainment this year) or conversions to profitable sales.
Additionally, there's a lot fewer studies on piracy post-revenue nadir. It seems as if the rise of streaming has caused the industry to stop panicking so much about piracy, and there's some evidence that streaming has converted consumers to paying customers.
All-in-all, I would say that it's not so much that piracy hurt the industry as piracy filled the existence of a market segment that the industry refused to fill. Piracy only hurt the industry in the same way digital cameras hurt Kodak: the existing business model was unsustainable, but they refused to pivot to take advantage of the clear coming shift in the business model.
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?
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.
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...
The Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) is a think tank based in Irving, Texas and founded in 1987 by Congressman Dick Armey to "research, develop and promote innovative and non-partisan solutions to today's public policy problems."[1]
IPI is an associate member of the State Policy Network (SPN), a network of right-wing "think tanks" and other non profits spanning 49 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico.[2]
The conservative Capital Research Center ranked IPI as amongst the most conservative groups in the US, scoring it as an "eight" on a scale of one to eight.[3] IPI has received funding from corporations like Exxon Mobil and organizations like the Kochs' Claude R. Lambe Foundation, Scaife Foundations, the Bradley Foundation and others....
> RIAA Efforts Backfire
Basically every story written about RIAA since the Clinton administration :-)