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The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a trade group representing the U.S. recording industry. Primary goals of the RIAA are to lobby congress, negotiate policy with other industries (such as technology developers, recording & play-back device manufactuers, etc.) and to influence the perceptions and social behavior of consumers via the media on behalf of its constituent members.
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Responsibilities
The RIAA was formed in 1952. Its primary purpose at that time was to administer the RIAA equalization curve. This is a technical standard of frequency response applied to vinyl records during manufacturing and playback. The RIAA has continued to participate in creating and administering technical standards for later systems of music recording and reproduction, including magnetic tape, cassette tapes, digital audio tapes, CDs, and software-based digital technologies.
The RIAA also participates in the collection, administration and distribution of music licenses and royalties.
It is the body responsible for certifying gold and platinum albums and singles in the USA. For more information about sales data see list of best selling albums and list of best selling singles.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) represents the interests of the commercial music publishing industry, not the artists, nor the listeners.
File-sharing controversy
The RIAA has been at the heart of the file-sharing controversy, especially music files in the popular MP3 format uploaded onto the Internet using peer-to-peer software. The RIAA has long contended that sharing of copyrighted music was a form of piracy, applying the well-known computing term to music. Hilary Rosen, the RIAA's president and chief executive officer from 1988 to 2003, was an outspoken critic of peer to peer file sharing, and under her direction, the RIAA waged an aggressive legal campaign trying to halt the practice. More recent RIAA presidents have also continued the RIAA's stance toward peer to peer file sharing. The RIAA and its member groups argue that Internet distribution of music, without the consent of the owner of the copyright in that music, not only detrimentally affected the profits of their members, but the careers of current and future artists as well, due to possible stagnation of the music industry from lack of innovation and production of a quality product.
Opponents of the RIAA underline that the trade group is, in effect, an organized cartel which artificially inflates and fixes the prices for CDs. The allegations note that the Big Four (EMI, Sony-BMG, Universal Music, and Warner) distribute over 95 percent of all music CDs sold worldwide, and that the share of the price of an individual CD actually received by the artist is negligably low compared to the share retained by the record company as profit. In 2003, the major CD issuers in the American market, including the "Big Four" settled a major scale price-fixing case brought by 43 state Attorneys General by issuing refunds to consumers and donating CDs to libraries and educational groups. 1 However, the RIAA still continues their alleged mob-like business practices.
The apparent effectiveness of the RIAA's litigation tactics appeared to be in question and its image in the public eye severely damaged when they sued Brianna Lahara, a 12-year-old honors student from New York City 2. The image was dealt further damage when they subpoenaed an 83-year-old grandmother, Gertrude Walton. Mrs. Walton stood accused of swapping rock, pop and rap songs. While this would certainly have been an odd accusation for an 83-year-old with an intense dislike of computers, the case was made further absurd due to the fact that Mrs. Walton had passed away a number of months prior to the case 3. Recently, Patricia Santangelo has made the news by challenging the RIAA's absurd lawsuit against her.
Most well known and successful artists openly oppose the RIAA's policy of trying to sue file-traders, encourage their fans to share their music online, while legally preventing the RIAA from suing people distributing their music online.
To date, the RIAA has sued approximately 13,000 people in the United States suspected of sharing copyrighted works, almost all of them unsuccessfully.4 The Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that over 60 million Americans are using popular file-sharing programs.5
The RIAA's legal campaign experienced a severe setback in December of 2003, when a federal appeals court overturned a lower court order requiring Verizon to disclose the identities of file-sharing customers based on a simple one-page subpoena. The RIAA claims this procedure was sanctioned by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, but the appeals court ruled that the DMCA regulation applies only to data actually hosted by an Internet service provider, rather than data on a customer's computer. The United States Supreme Court let this ruling stand in 2004. As a result, the RIAA must now file individual civil suits against each accused file-sharer, and the ISP and alleged file sharer have many more legal avenues for preventing disclosure of their identity, making the entire process much more expensive, slow, and complicated for the RIAA.6
Another setback occurred in 2005, when the court dismissed Priority Records v. Chan 7 because it was ruled that the mother couldn't be sued for the alleged infringements of her 13 year old daughter. 8 Prosecuting a minor is more difficult, and many previous adult defendants have said that the P2P software installation and copyright infringement was done without their knowledge by one of their children.
Recent suits in 2005 have been focused on University and college-aged students, with the purpose stated by the RIAA to deter and discourage unethical habits by youth on the verge of entering the world community. Student access to 24-hour high speed computer networks is very popular at American universities, providing students with ample bandwidth for file-trading.
It should be noted that the RIAA has done little to garner any positive goodwill from consumers by suing people for trading music, and that their goals are to retain the status quo, erode the concept of fair use, and prevent the cost benefits of much cheaper modern digital recording and distribution techniques from reaching consumers — in essence, to prevent a new disruptive technology from forcing the fundamental alteration of the recording industry's business model. Hilary Rosen had this to say, two years after she was no longer the head of the RIAA:
The central premise that tech will "wait until we are ready with our business models" is not going to work w/. These are not legal decisions or trade association PR responsibilities on either side. They are fundamentally business issues that must be addressed in the marketplace.
Work (Made) For Hire controversy
In 1999, Mitchell Glazier, a Congressional staff attorney, inserted, without public notice or comment, substantive language into the final markup of a "technical corrections" section of copyright legislation, classifying many music recordings as "works made for hire," thereby stripping artists of their copyright interests and transferring those interests to their record labels. Shortly afterwards, Glazier was hired as Senior Vice President of Government Relations and Legislative Counsel for the RIAA, which vigorously defended the change when it came to light. The battle over the disputed provision led to the formation of the Recording Artists' Coalition, which successfully lobbied for repeal of the change.
See also
External links
- RIAA official website
- Boycott RIAA homepage
- The Subpoena Defense Alliance - provides information on court decisions related to identity disclosure and the Verizon case in particular
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation: RIAA vs. The People anti-RIAA site with a compilation of relevant legal research
- RIAA vs. The People RIAA related lawsuits, intimidation, and extortion
- tinfoil.music RIAA/MPAA News Website
- p2pnet.net RIAA/MPAA/Tech News Website
- AfterDawn RIAA/MPAA/Tech News Website
- US Attorney General Pushed to Go After File Traders - August 2002 MP3 Newswire article on how the RIAA manipulated the US government to chase file sharers for them
- The Riaa Radar - find out if a specific CD was released by a RIAA member or a "free" label
- Nielsen Rating System At Odds With RIAA's Claim Of "Lost Sales" - Music Dish - Moses Avalon
- The Jackboot Paradox and the Fall of the Music Industry - Why attempts to stamp out piracy are doomed, and what the music industry should really do to survive
- Courtney Love Does The Math -- a working musician's perspective on the RIAA and the interests it promotes
- RIAA Will Keep On Suing June 2005 update from Rolling Stone
- The RIAA Settles Fast With 12-year-old Trader - September 2003 MP3 Newswire article
- The Supreme Wisdom of Not Relying on the Court - June 2005 Huffington Post article by Hilary Rosen