[solaris]

In a new report released Wednesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wonders aloud about the RIAA's litigation conflagration with questions like "Has the arbitrary singling out of nearly 30,000 random American families helped promote public respect for copyright law?" and "Have the lawsuits put the P2P genie back in the bottle or restored the record industry to its 1997 revenues?"
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Unless the EFF has been infiltrated by a race of pod people and the current "Fred von Lohmann" is actually a soulless alien grown in some sort of spiny cocoon, the answer is guaranteed to be "no." Scratch that—according to the report, the answer is actually a "resounding" no.

Full story here:

Five years of failure: EFF says RIAA must embrace new model

[rolly]

The EFF envisions a fee of $5-10 a month that would be paid to a new collecting society and distributed to artists and labels, and consumers could download whatever they want, however they want.

I wonder how many people would pay.......

[Dave C]

Originally Posted by rolly

I wonder how many people would pay.......

If it were $10 a month, and you could download any music, from a decent site (and I would class many of the sites mentioned on this forum as decent, plus i-tunes (after losing the DRM of course)), I would definitely sign up. The problem is it is going to be ages before they finally get round to doing this properly as at the moment it still seems that they are going to be basing it on a 'rental' system and artists would have to sign up for it:-

Essentially, this would be a music subscription service that allowed for DRM-free downloads and for keeping all music downloaded while paying the license.

there's no way for users to know whether the artists whose work they're grabbing has actually signed on with the collecting society

There is no way I would ever sign up to this sort of system.

Get a site with a music catalogue which is a cross between i-tunes, e-music & mp3sparks (can't forget the classical buffs) with the format & bitrate download options of mp3sparks and where the music was yours to own (for life) once it was on your computer. Also include unlimited downloads, or atleast an acceptable cap of say 500 tracks a month, and I would easily pay $50 a month for that . Hell, I'm paying $30 a month at the moment for just my e-music subscription, and that is only 75 tracks a month.

Long way to go yet, but I remain optimistic
Cheers,
Dave

[skyforger]

same old ...