From American Thinker:
The Copyright Industry, especially the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), and MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) have suppressed every form of innovation, and technology to protect their questionable rights. In the 80s, they sued to stop video recorders, but were thankfully held back by the Supreme Court in the famous Betamax case. The Media Industry forced manufacturers of blank cassettes, tapes, and CDs to pay a royalty to reimburse the industry because the blank recording media might be used to infringe copyright. That is right; your preacher’s sermon tapes actually were forced to subsidize Hollywood.
In 1998, the RIAA sued to stop the first portable Mp3 player, Diamond Rio, from being sold.
In 1999, they took down Napster, the breakthrough file sharing program upstart. Then they cut a swath of destruction going after a plethora of file sharing services, with such vicious tactics as suing children who downloaded songs for unconscionable amounts of money.
Upping the outrage, they tried to gut the First Amendment with the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), which imperiled the whole Internet by making search engines and hosting companies liable for piracy that the technology companies had nothing to do with. Only when technology giants apprised Congress that technology produced more jobs than the media, did Congress back off. Temporarily!
In 2014, the RIAA considered suing Google for even listing sites that people could use to rip media.
. . . .
Hollywood media moguls are intent on preserving a dying business model. Worse yet, they expect technology companies to provide the technical expertise to protect their quasi-monopoly. It is much cheaper to have Google, Microsoft, and Facebook pay programmers to fight piracy than the RIAA actually hiring programmers to come up with the technology themselves.
Then again, their incompetence in this area has been humiliating.
In an attempt to curb music piracy, major labels such as Sony started selling music CDs that have built-in “copy-proof” technology. The technology was meant to stop people from copying music from these discs onto recordable CDs or hard drives. There’s a fatal flaw in this technology, however, which allows you to bypass the copy protection with a simple marker pen, and a recent upsurge in Internet newsgroup talk about this flaw has brought it to light again. — Geek (2002)
Link to the rest at American Thinker and thanks to Doug for the tip.
I may or may not have noticed that every January there is a sharp increase of DDoS attacks on torrent sites. If I had observed such a thing, I would wonder if it was connected to the start of a new fiscal/planning year at certain organizations.
Just like everything else, it’s better to make it unprofitable for pirates than it is to pirate-proof it.
Which means making it easier and cheaper to get/use, not harder and more expensive.
DRM (digital restriction management) hurts those that actually ‘buy’ your stuff, it barely slows a pirate and the cracked/clean copy the pirate offers is often easier to use than the store bought copy.
Case in point, I found some bargain-bin music CDs I’d bought but never opened (until they were rediscovered) which play fine in my CD player, but my Windows 7 computer refuses to read them. For me that’s no hardship, I have an old Windows 2000 system with Roco installed that will rip them just fine.
Your average Joe though will feel he was ripped off by the music company and search for a fix. And once Joe finds a cheaper/free way to get his music, why would he ever give them any more of his time or money?
Youtube ripping websites?
Fighting that is futile. Putting them out of business achieves nothing because Youtube downloader apps work better, are free, and leave no online footprints.