Point: The RIAA has gone through great lengths to shut down potentially beneficial filesharing applications because of their commitment to preventing illegal downloading.
“In the 2008 trial of the RIAA vs. The Pirate Bay, the RIAA are seeking $13 million dollars in damages for 34 cases of copyright infringement- one per file. If this is true, that means the download of one file… is worth about $382, 353.”
The technological innovation that began with Napster in 1999 has slowed to a crawl in the past five years due to lawsuits from the RIAA because of the role of illegal downloading in filesharing applications. Alternatively, the industry for filesharing mediums boomed directly after Napster’s takedown, but those start-up sites were also targeted by the RIAA and taken down quickly. The case of MGM vs. Grokster set the precedent for filesharing sites and software creators to be held liable for third-party infringement, even if the sites could serve another, legal purpose. Both Groker and Morpheus, the two filesharing applications on trial, could be used to beta-test video games, find bugs in new software, and generate hype for literature, a difficult market to advertise in. Both included a section of the application specifically dedicated to helping new artists gain recognition as well. In the end, the Supreme Court decided that the creators of the two applications kept distributing their software with the knowledge that most of its content was illegal, and both were shut down. Contradicting this, in the trial of John Deep vs. RIAA the court decided that the ratio of illegal to legal content of Aimster could not be effectively determined, and therefore it could not be shut down. In order to combat the slowing of technological advancement in the realm of music advertising and sharing, the Open Music Model was created. Mainly, the OMM advocates a completely open and free market for music, complete with open file formats. They encouraged the music industry to consider “Playment”, a business model where consumers could download whatever they wanted for a low monthly fee from a comprehensive library, similar to iTunes. The current Apple model, however, costs too much for the average consumer to use as a first option, because prices are determined by the needs of the artists, managers, record labels, and royalty owners all rolled into one 3-minute track. Potentially, streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora can help revamp the innovation that was quelled by the RIAA’s rampage in the early 2000s.