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RIAA defend legal expenditure
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 3 August 2010
The Recording Industry Association Of America would like it to be known they’re not as shit as we all think. Well, not quite as shit. You’ll remember the recent reports about how the US major label trade body spent millions on legal fees relating to their self-harming sue-the-fans litigation campaign in 2008, while also paying their boss $2 million. The same reports pointed out how little money came in via damages payments from those lawsuits. As much previously reported, the sue-the-fans lawsuit campaign achieved nothing except to make the record industry look like a bunch of out of touch bastards.
Responding to those reports, which were based on the trade body’s 2008 account filings with US tax authorities, the trade body said last week that the multi-million legal fees reported on were not just spent on suing fans, but also covered other litigation activity, including actions against the makers of file-sharing services like Kazaa and LimeWire. Some legal advice also fed into lobbying activity regarding US copyright laws.
While arguably those other legal battles haven’t achieved much in combating online piracy either, the Kazaa case did provide a better return on investment in terms of the damages settlement the US record industry eventually negotiated.
In a statement, the RIAA also argued that the aim of its file-sharing litigation was never about winning uber-damages, but about fostering “respect for the rights of creators” and “creating a level playing field for legal services”. They concluded: “On that count, we think our efforts have made a real difference”.
Of course, it is easy to bash the RIAA, and we did say at the time that the recent set of bashing clearly involved at least a little anti-spin being put on the trade body’s legal spending. But then it’s easy to bash the RIAA because the over paid buffoons who run it were among the slowest to adapt to the changing world created by the web, and were the last to recognise the digital age brought as many opportunities as threats.
The recent interpretations of the RIAA’s expenditure were almost certainly unfairly skewed to show the trade body in a bad light. But I still believe the US record industry will recover in the next decade despite rather than because of the work of the RIAA.
