Recording Industry Association of America

Recording Industry Association of America
Formation	1952
Type	Technical standards, licensing and royalties
Headquarters	Washington, DC
Location	United States
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer	Mitch Bainwol
Website	www.riaa.com

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a trust that represents the recording industry distributors in the United States. Its members consist of record labels and distributors, which the RIAA say "create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 85% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States".

The RIAA was formed in 1952 primarily to administer the RIAA equalization curve, 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 (including cassette tapes and digital audio tapes), CDs and software-based digital technologies.

The RIAA participates in the collective rights management of sound recording. The association is also responsible for certifying gold and platinum albums and singles in the USA.

The RIAA lists its goals as:

to protect intellectual property rights worldwide and the First Amendment rights of artists;

to perform research about the music industry;

to monitor and review relevant laws, regulations and policies.

Company structure and sales

As of April 2007, the RIAA is led by Mitch Bainwol, who has been Chairman and CEO since 2003. He is assisted by Cary Sherman, the President of the Board of Directors. The board of directors consists of 26 members of the board, drawn mostly from the big four members of the RIAA.

The RIAA represents over 1,600 member labels, which are private corporate entities such as record labels and distributors, and which collectively create and distribute about 90% of recorded music sold in the United States. The largest and most influential of the members are the "Big Four" that include:

EMI

Sony Music Entertainment

Universal Music Group

Warner Music Group

The total retail value of recordings sold by members of the RIAA is reported to be $10.4 billion[4] at the end of 2007, reflecting a decline from a high of $14.6 billion in 1999.

Sales certification

Main article: RIAA certification

The RIAA operates an award program for albums that sell a large number of copies. The program originally began in 1958, with a Gold Award for singles and albums that reach US$1 million sales. The criteria was changed in 1975 to be based on the number of copies sold, with singles and albums selling 500,000 copies awarded the Gold Award. In 1976, a Platinum Award was added for one million sales, and in 1999 a Diamond Award for ten million sales. The awards are open to both RIAA members and non-members.

The RIAA also operates a similar program for Spanish language music sales, called Los Premios Awards.

“Digital” sales certification

In 2004, the RIAA added a branch of certification for what it calls “digital” recordings, meaning roughly “recordings transferred to the recipient over a network” (such as those sold via the iTunes Store), and excluding other obviously-digital media such as those on CD, DAT, or MiniDiscs. In 2006, “digital ringtones” were added to this branch of certification. As of 2007, the certification criteria for these recordings are as follows:

Silver: more than 100,000 copies

Gold: more than 500,000 copies

Platinum: more than 1,000,000 copies

Multi-Platinum: more than 2,000,000 copies

Diamond: more than 10,000,000 copies

Video Longform certification

Along with albums, digital albums, and singles there is another classification of music release called "Video Longform." This release format includes: DVD and VHS releases, and certain live albums and compilation albums. The certification criteria is slightly different from other styles.

Gold: 50,000

Platinum: 100,000

Efforts against infringement of members' copyrights

Efforts against file sharing

Main article: Trade group efforts against file sharing

The RIAA opposes unauthorized sharing of its music. Studies conducted since the association began its campaign against peer-to-peer file-sharing have concluded that losses incurred per download range from negligible to substantial.

The association has commenced high profile lawsuits against file sharing service providers. It has also commenced a series of lawsuits against individuals suspected of file sharing, notably college students and parents of file sharing children. It is accused of employing techniques such as peer-to-peer "decoying" and "spoofing" to combat file sharing.

As of late 2008 they have announced they will stop their lawsuits and instead are attempting to work with ISPs who will use a three strike warning system for file sharing, and upon the third strike will cut off internet service all together. However as of 2009 no major ISPs have announced they are part of the plan, and Verizon has publicly denied any involvement with this plan.

Selection of defendants

The RIAA names defendants based on ISP identification of the subscriber associated with an IP address, and as such do not know any additional information about a person before they sue. After an Internet subscriber's identity is discovered, but before an individual lawsuit is filed, the subscriber is typically offered an opportunity to settle. The standard settlement is a payment to the RIAA and an agreement not to engage in file-sharing of music and is usually on par with statutory damages of $750 per work, with the RIAA choosing the number of works it deems "reasonable". For cases that do not settle at this amount, the RIAA has gone to trial, seeking statutory damages from the jury, written into The Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 as between $750 and $30,000 per work or $750 and $150,000 per work if "willful." In the case RIAA v. Tenenbaum, the jury awarded the RIAA $22,500 per song shared by Joel Tenenbaum resulting in a judgment of $675,000 for the shared 30 tracks (this was later reduced to $67,500 by the judge) and in the case RIAA v. Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the jury awarded $80,000 per song, or $1.92 million for 24 tracks (this award was later reduced by the judge to $54,000, though the final amount of damages has yet to be determined).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Citizen oppose the ability of the RIAA and other companies to "strip Internet users of anonymity without allowing them to challenge the order in court".

The RIAA's methods of identifying individual users had, in some rare cases, led to the issuing of subpoena to a recently deceased 83-year-old woman, an elderly computer novice, and a family reportedly without any computer at all.

Settlement programs

In February, 2007 the RIAA began sending letters accusing internet users of sharing files and directing them to web site P2PLAWSUITS.COM, where they can make "discount" settlements payable by credit card. The letters go on to say that anyone not settling will have lawsuits brought against them. Typical settlements are between $3,000 and $12,000. This new strategy was formed because the RIAA's legal fees were cutting into the income from settlements. In 2008, RIAA sued nineteen-year-old Ciara Sauro for allegedly sharing ten songs online.

The RIAA also launched an 'early settlement program' directed to ISPs and to colleges and universities, urging them to pass along letters to subscribers and students offering early "settlements", prior to the disclosure of their identities. The settlement letters urged ISPs to preserve evidence for the benefit of the RIAA and invited the students and subscribers to visit an RIAA website for the purpose of entering into a "discount settlement" payable by credit card. By March 2007, the focus had shifted from ISPs to colleges and universities.

[edit]Lawsuits against other recording, distribution, and search technologies

In October 1998, the Recording Industry Association of America filed a lawsuit in the Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco claiming the Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300 player violated the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act. The Rio PMP300 was significant because it was the second portable consumer MP3 digital audio player released on the market. The three judge panel ruled in favor of Diamond, paving the way for the development of the portable digital player market.

In 2003, the RIAA sued college student developers of LAN search engines Phynd and Flatlan, describing them as "a sophisticated network designed to enable widespread music thievery".

In September 2003, the RIAA filed suit in civil court against several private individuals who had shared large numbers of files with Kazaa. Most of these suits were settled with monetary payments averaging $3,000. Kazaa publisher Sharman Networks responded with a lawsuit against the RIAA, alleging that the terms of use of the network were violated and that unauthorized client software was used in the investigation to track down the individual file sharers (such as Kazaa Lite). An effort to throw out this suit was denied in January 2004, however, that suit was settled in 2006.

RIAA has also filed suit in 2006 to enjoin digital XM Satellite Radio from enabling its subscribers from playing songs it has recorded from its satellite broadcasts. It is also suing several Internet radio stations.

On December 21, 2006, the RIAA filed a lawsuit against Russian owned and operated website AllOfMP3.com in the amount of $1.65 trillion ($1,650,000,000,000). This number was derived from multiplying 11 million songs with statutory damages of $150,000 per song. The Moscow court ruled in favor of AllOfMP3.com.

On October 12, 2007, the RIAA sued Usenet.com seeking a permanent injunction to prevent the company from "aiding, encouraging, enabling, inducing, causing, materially contributing to, or otherwise facilitating [copyright infringement]". This suit, the first that the RIAA has filed against a Usenet provider, has added another branch to the RIAA's rapidly expanding fight to curb the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials. Unlike many of the RIAA's previous lawsuits, this suit is filed against the provider of a service who has no direct means of removing infringing content. The RIAA's argument relies heavily on the fact the Usenet.com, the only defendant that has been named currently, promoted their service with slogans and phrases that strongly suggested that the service could be used to obtain free music.

On April 28, 2008, RIAA member labels sued Project Playlist, a web music search site, claiming that the majority of the sound recordings in the site's index of links are infringing. Project Playlist's website denies that any of the music is hosted on Project Playlist's own servers. 

On October 26, 2010, RIAA members won a case against LimeWire, a P2P file sharing network, for illegal distribution of copyrighted works. On October 29, in retaliation, riaa.org was taken offline via denial-of-service attack executed by members of Operation Payback and Anonymous .

The "work made for hire" controversy

In 1999, Mitch 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

Federal Communications Commission (FCC)

(source:wikipedia)

Intellectual property

Intellectual property (IP) is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which property rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law. Under intellectual property law, owners are granted certain exclusive rights to a variety of intangible assets, such as musical, literary, and artistic works; discoveries and inventions; and words, phrases, symbols, and designs. Common types of intellectual property include copyrights, trademarks, patents, industrial design rights and trade secrets in some jurisdictions.

Although many of the legal principles governing intellectual property have evolved over centuries, it was not until the 19th century that the term intellectual property began to be used, and not until the late 20th century that it became commonplace in the United States. The British Statute of Anne 1710 and the Statute of Monopolies 1623 are now seen as the origin of copyright and patent law respectively.

History

History of patent law and History of copyright law

Modern usage of the term intellectual property goes back at least as far as 1888 with the founding in Bern of the Swiss Federal Office for Intellectual Property (the Bureau fédéral de la propriété intellectuelle). When the administrative secretariats established by the Paris Convention (1883) and the Berne Convention (1886) merged in 1893, they also located in Berne, and also adopted the term intellectual property in their new combined title, the United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property. The organisation subsequently relocated to Geneva in 1960, and was succeeded in 1967 with the establishment of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) by treaty as an agency of the United Nations. According to Lemley, it was only at this point that the term really began to be used in the United States (which had not been a party to the Berne Convention), and it did not enter popular usage until passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980.

"The history of patents does not begin with inventions, but rather with royal grants by Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) for monopoly privileges... Approximately 200 years after the end of Elizabeth's reign, however, a patent represents a legal [right] obtained by an inventor providing for exclusive control over the production and sale of his mechanical or scientific invention... [demonstrating] the evolution of patents from royal prerogative to common-law doctrine." ]

In an 1818 collection of his writings, the French liberal theorist, Benjamin Constant, argued against the recently introduced idea of "property which has been called intellectual." The term intellectual property can be found used in an October 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in the patent case Davoll et al. v. Brown., in which Justice Charles L. Woodbury wrote that "only in this way can we protect intellectual property, the labors of the mind, productions and interests are as much a man's own...as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears." (1 Woodb. & M. 53, 3 West.L.J. 151, 7 F.Cas. 197, No. 3662, 2 Robb.Pat.Cas. 303, Merw.Pat.Inv. 414). The statement that "discoveries are...property" goes back earlier. Section 1 of the French law of 1791 stated, "All new discoveries are the property of the author; to assure the inventor the property and temporary enjoyment of his discovery, there shall be delivered to him a patent for five, ten or fifteen years." In Europe, French author A. Nion mentioned propriété intellectuelle in his Droits civils des auteurs, artistes et inventeurs, published in 1846.

The concept's origins can potentially be traced back further. Jewish law includes several considerations whose effects are similar to those of modern intellectual property laws, though the notion of intellectual creations as property does not seem to exist – notably the principle of Hasagat Ge'vul (unfair encroachment) was used to justify limited-term publisher (but not author) copyright in the 16th century. The Talmud contains the prohibitions against certain mental crimes (further elaborated in the Shulchan Aruch), notably Geneivat da'at (גניבת דעת, literally "mind theft"), which some have interpreted[9] as prohibiting theft of ideas, though the doctrine is principally concerned with fraud and deception, not property.

Objectives

Financial incentive

These exclusive rights allow owners of intellectual property to benefit from the property they have created, providing a financial incentive for the creation of and investment in intellectual property, and, in case of patents, pay associated research and development costs. Some commentators, such as David Levine and Michele Boldrin, dispute this justification.

Economic growth

The existence of IP laws is credited with significant contributions toward economic growth. Economists estimate that two-thirds of the value of large businesses in the U.S. can be traced to intangible assets. "IP-intensive industries" are estimated to generate 72 percent more value added (price minus material cost) per employee than "non-IP-intensive industries".

A joint research project of the WIPO and the United Nations University measuring the impact of IP systems on six Asian countries found "a positive correlation between the strengthening of the IP system and subsequent economic growth." Other models, such as the Nash equilibrium, would not expect that this correlation necessarily means causation: The Nash equilibrium model predicts that patent holders will prefer to operate in countries with stronger IP laws. In some of the cases, as was shown for Taiwan[14] after the 1986 reform, the economic growth that comes with a stronger IP system might be due to an increase in stock capital from direct foreign investment.

Criticism

Criticism of intellectual property

The term itself

Richard Stallman argues that, although the term intellectual property is in wide use, it should be rejected altogether, because it "systematically distorts and confuses these issues, and its use was and is promoted by those who gain from this confusion." He claims that the term "operates as a catch-all to lump together disparate laws [which] originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues" and that it confuses these monopolies with ownership of limited physical things. Stallman advocates referring to copyrights, patents and trademarks in the singular and warns against abstracting disparate laws into a collective term.

Limitation

Some critics of intellectual property, such as those in the free culture movement, point at intellectual monopolies as harming health, preventing progress, and benefiting concentrated interests to the detriment of the masses, and argue that the public interest is harmed by ever expansive monopolies in the form of copyright extensions, software patents and business method patents.

There is also criticism[by whom?] because strict intellectual property rights can inhibit the flow of innovations to poor nations. Developing countries have benefitted from the spread of developed country technologies, such as the internet, mobile phone, vaccines, and high-yielding grains. Many intellectual property rights, such as patent laws, arguably go too far in protecting those who produce innovations at the expense of those who use them.[citation needed] The Commitment to Development Index measures donor government policies and ranks them on the "friendliness" of their intellectual property rights to the developing world.

Some libertarian critics of intellectual property have argued that allowing property rights in ideas and information creates artificial scarcity and infringes on the right to own tangible property. Stephan Kinsella uses the following scenario to argue this point:

[I]magine the time when men lived in caves. One bright guy—let's call him Galt-Magnon—decides to build a log cabin on an open field, near his crops. To be sure, this is a good idea, and others notice it. They naturally imitate Galt-Magnon, and they start building their own cabins. But the first man to invent a house, according to IP advocates, would have a right to prevent others from building houses on their own land, with their own logs, or to charge them a fee if they do build houses. It is plain that the innovator in these examples becomes a partial owner of the tangible property (e.g., land and logs) of others, due not to first occupation and use of that property (for it is already owned), but due to his coming up with an idea. Clearly, this rule flies in the face of the first-user homesteading rule, arbitrarily and groundlessly overriding the very homesteading rule that is at the foundation of all property rights.

Other criticism of intellectual property law concerns the tendency of the protections of intellectual property to expand, both in duration and in scope. The trend has been toward longer copyright protection (raising fears that it may some day be eternal). In addition, the developers and controllers of items of intellectual property have sought to bring more items under the protection. Patents have been granted for living organisms, and colors have been trademarked. Because they are systems of government-granted monopolies copyrights, patents, and trademarks are called intellectual monopoly privileges, (IMP) a topic on which several academics, including Birgitte Andersen and Thomas Alured Faunce have written.

In 2005 the RSA launched the Adelphi Charter, aimed at creating an international policy statement to frame how governments should make balanced intellectual property law.

(source:wikipedia)