The TRUTH about the RIAA????

[Gunslinger]

Anyone ever hear this before?  I checked snopes and didn't see anything.

http://www.boycott-riaa.com/facts/truth

Every Music CDR since the AHRA was enacted has a hidden tax built into the price! (2% of the manufacturers sales) This is supposedly to pay the artists for home recording. Who Collects the Tax? The RIAA under the auspices of the AARC. Supposedly, 40% is set aside for artists, and 60% for the labels. To date I have not found an artist who has received even one cent of this money. (Source: RIAA website) In addition every CD recorder has a $2.00 surcharge built into the price that goes directly to the RIAA
The artists received not one cent of the money from the MP3.Com settlements of approx $158 Million to the labels. Who did??? The label themselves.

"SoundExchange" the new digital rights collective for collecting royalties from internet play is a division of the RIAA. They did not distribute royalties in July 2001 as they were supposed to do, but instead decided to wait until next year.

85% of all music is released by 5 major labels (Sony, EMI, UMG, Time Warner, & BMG)
Federal Trade Commission (FTC Statement)

At any given point about 20% of the music every recorded is available legally. The rest is locked away by the labels depriving the creators of a potential source of income, the fans of the music they want, while creating a false market for the band "d'jour."

The RIAA on their website say the cost of CD's haven't risen as much as they could have read our take it.

Read the settlement statement of the FTC findings against the Big 5
concerning charges that all five companies illegally modified their existing cooperative advertising programs to induce retailers into charging consumers higher prices for CDs
 

In 1999 music sales were up 11% not down
Testimony of Hank Barry quoting a RIAA survey
Chief Executive Officer
Napster, Inc.
Before the Senate Judiciary Committee

In the first quarter of 2000 music sales are up 8% over last year
Testimony of Hank Barry
Chief Executive Officer
Napster, Inc.
Before the Senate Judiciary Committee

Only companies can join the RIAA, they do nothing for the independent musician.
RIAA website guidelines for membership

Companies such as Napster and  MP3.Com can't join RIAA due to the lawsuits brought by RIAA.

We can control the distribution of music, by not buying any and boycotting the labels other businesses as well.

See where the money really goes  Steve Albini (producer of Nirvana's "In Utero)

Interesting comment from Fox Entertainment Group (FOX) Chief Executive Peter Chernin, who has about as much of a clue as Jack Valenti:
"Film makers can offer their audience a choice of ways to see movies -- they can view them in the theater, rent them, or buy them" "Music companies are much less flexible." "It's hard to buy one song. You're forced to buy the CD," he said.

"I'd like to introduce the recording industry to something called bottled water," Jonathan Potter, executive director of Digital Media Association, said in a recent interview commenting on Free vs Fee online music. His lobbying group represents music sites that are trying to promote and sell music over the Internet.

It is not correct to assume that every time a copy is made, a sale is lost, said Gary Shapiro, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association. And, he also pointed out that many of the companies he represents, which make computers and other gadgets that enable people to copy music or download MP3s, have seen their sales fall much more sharply.

EDIT:  There's a bunch of links on the actual site...I'm too lazy to trasnscribe them.

[Sandman]

Similar story on Digg. It's been reported as possibly being inaccurate.

http://digg.com/tech_news/We_all_pay_to_the_RIAA

[Fishu]

Over here it's all legal with recording media, although not yet on a computer hardware.

The Private Copying Levy in Finland:
Background
Prices

This week I bought a stack of 25 blank DVD+R discs for $13.50, from neightboring country Estonia. Why? Because I was able to avert the levy by doing so. If I had bought the same pack from Finland, it would've cost me $43, mostly thanks to the levy.

With the price of $13.50 (10.53 w/o VAT) for 25 discs a single disc would cost ~54 cents (42c w/o VAT) . The levy for a single 4.7 GB disc is ~75.3 cents(!). Therefore the levy would be roughly $18.81 for 25 discs. The levy is then added to the price, increasing the total price to $29.34 without VAT and with 22% VAT the discs would cost as much as $35.79. A huge difference. The actual cost in Finland is $43, which is over $7 more than in the example, which is probably explained by higher running costs than in Estonia.

(multiplier of 1.25 was used to convert euros to dollars)

The Finnish Levy is totally outrageous.
The only way to dodge the levy within the country is to order recordable media in the name of a company or an organization and to make a promise that the recordable media will not be used to save copyrighted material that is not related to the organization or company.
For some odd reason they require the applicant to be either a company or an organization even though the law says that the levy does not apply to people who needs the recordable products for their profession. Nowhere in the law is specificly told that it needs to be either a company or an organization.

I bought the DVD's to burn my own copyrighted material into the discs. Yet they'd like me to pay the outrageously high levy because they assume the discs will be used to save someone elses copyrighted material. The levy is supposed to "support the creators" - wheres my support? Oh yeah, I'd have to pay $130 to join in their ranks.

The most hilarious thing is that they recently outlawed illegal private copying with a new copyright law. The before legal private copying was the very reason for the levy. Now they're collecting the levy of something that shouldn't be done in the first place. Very reasonable, huh?

The levy is commonly practiced within the EU, as apparent from the list at the bottom of the background page.