Technics: Music file-sharing: Music overlords try to kill off LimeWire P2P music hub

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Yep, old-school greed-capitalism is still trying to dictate your choice of music and ability to share-give-to / share-get-from fellow individual music-lovers for non-commercial purposes. The pretense that the benefits of sales-only music exchange in a digital-electronic age benefits the artists has been blown sky-h+ by studies from within the music industry itself. However, it doesn't serve the private purposes of those codgers formed by the old business culture to revise, each in his/her own case, their companies' business models, and perhaps those presently in power are incapable of doings so. Perhaps only a new generation of executives at the corporations joined in the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) can catch up to the study-backed proof that P2P music sharing advances the music culture and the companies that produce for it, but most of all the artists. (Altho not the mega-stars who already are awash in multmillions, awards, and stardom - but everyone else musically creative as MySpace and other new artists' webdoms based on sharing, further prove.

As one wag on the subject, posting on Slashdot properly denominates the music-industry dominants "Recording Industrialists Against Artists."

TechNotes, by Owlie Scowlie

The companies behind the new lawsuit against Lime Group which operates the LimeWire music P2P file-sharers hub) are Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Vivendi's Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Britain's EMI Music -- companies which are so top-heavy with overpaid tiers of executives that they should all be banked out, ruptured. But, lol. They'll win and will decimate the last standing major P2P noncommercial file-sharing music hub, because they are intent upon determining how the Internet works -- so that it works only for them and their kind and their shoddy products and megalomaniacal overpaid top-stars.

Techdirt has the most analytic, incisive write-up that I've seen so far:

As has been widely expected, the RIAA has officially gone after Limewire today. Following the Supreme Court Grokster decision that didn't actually say Grokster was guilty of copyright infringement (just that they could be liable if they were found to have "induced" copyright infringement), the RIAA simply pretended that the ruling meant all file sharing apps were illegal and sent out warning letters to a bunch of them. Many shut down or tried to come up with other business models, while most users simply moved on to whatever else there was (and there were plenty of options). It looks like popular file sharing app Limewire continued to resist -- so now the RIAA is suing. What will be interesting is to see how far this case goes. If history is any indication, the RIAA will do its best to make the case as expensive as possible for Limewire, so they feel compelled to settle or just disappear completely. However, the firm does have a defense: they just need to show that they were not actively "inducing" copyright infringement -- even if that's what their software was often used for. They might want to take notes on Torrentspy's case against the MPAA. - Contributed by Mike with 35 comments to date on Techdirt

MPAA? That's the Motion Picture Association of America which is trying to prevent the sharing of digital-electronic movies via the Internet. Both industry orgs use decrepit old business models as tho they were written in stone, when in fact they are part of the recent failures of both industries, including exorbitant pricings and shoddy products from which consumers of cultural products have turned away in thousands upon thousands of droves.

Where have consumers gone? To P2P. That's person-to-person or peer-to-peer file-sharing and new artists who give away their creations for the very purpose of being picked up consumers who enjoy digitally certain few of the free downloads, and then go out and buy. This gives consumers of culture a real element of choice in what products become significant culturally, outside of RIAA and MPAA dictation and marketing games.

In the past this TechNotes column (see Siderbar for new Columns Index) has carried two synopses from a major statement by Dr. Michael Geist on the case for P2P file-sharing and other pro-consumer features of the Internet that the oligopolies of the culture and communications industry have tried to repress.

By the way, Techdirt carries a Google Ads ad-link for LimeWire™: Free Music. Which observation ties into a little matter of full disclosure. I have subscribed to and downloaded music from LimeWire in the past, and still have some songs from that source I would imagine. A practice which fell into neglect since it took me too long to download sufficient numbers of copies of any given song or spoken poem, from time to time, to get that special copy that wasn't scratchy. Plus, the practice tends to build up large files of songs to which I rarely if ever listened.

In Canada, non-commercial copying and file-sharing is not illegal, as long as the receiver in the sharing doesn't make any commercial use of the song/s. Now, I have been viciously attacked by the usual, Dr Fraud (aka Fred Pluthero), who is Canadian and pretends to be informed about everything, but apparently doesn't know Canadian law and morality in regard to noncommercial file-sharing P2P. As a Christian, I have also reflected on my P2P music file-sharing practice in M.D. Stalfleu's protestant philosophical-ethical system of theoretical frameworks, and have no problem with the practice within the parameters outlined. Dr Fraud however keeps braying no matter what level of moral and ethical responsiblity I have undertaken, which only raises questions about his motives. I bore you, dear readers, no further with the fraudster who has been keeping company with Dr Moriarty of late in the vicinity of dank tombs, it's said.

Futher Resources:

Dr Michael Geist on P2P, etc - Part I
Dr Michael Geist on P2P, etc - Part II

Tags: LimeWire targetted for P2P filesharing 'inducement' by Big Music

• aesthetics
• music
• filesharing
• p2p
• noncommercialuse
• musicindustry
• musicorporations
• RIAA
• MPAA