RIAA Trivia

Question: What online service did the RIAA claim should be shut down because it has no legal use, and is primarily used to share illegal files?

Answer: The World Wide Web (circa 1994)


History

Few people remember this, but in the early days of the web, the RIAA proposed shutting down the web. That's right; if the RIAA had its way in the early 1990's, the web as we know it would cease to exist. No Yahoo.com, no Slashdot, no P2P, no online banking, no web based email.

The RIAA claimed in the early 1990's that the primary purpose of the web was for students to pirate music. At the time, I remember them making statements stating that web and internet services such as FTP were used primarily for sharing music illegally. They even accused the burgeoning web of being used primarily for illegally sharing music.

General Public Believed Downloading Any Music Was Illegal

In the mid to late 1990's, the general public believed that downloading music was illegal. If you walked into a public place and said "I download music from the Internet", everyone would believe you were a music pirate engaging in a criminal act. There is a large base of free public domain music (often just as good as commercial music).

How did the public come to believe this? From news stories and statements made by the recording industry. They did not educate consumers that there is a difference between legal and illegal music; they led the public to believe that all downloadable music was illegal by claiming that online music services offered at the time had no legal use, or by stating that file sharing is primarily for illegal use.

RIAA Prevents Digital Audio Tape Distribution

That's right. Thanks to the RIAA, we never had music on digital audio tapes (DAT) for our home stereos. Only analog cassettes. The RIAA prevented companies from distributing music on a superior tape format because they claimed that it would just be used for piracy.

"As a consortium of hardware manufacturers developed the R-DAT (rotary head digital audio tape) format, the RIAA and similar international groups tried to encourage the adoption of copying safeguards. Unable to reach agreement with the manufacturers, most labels did not release any prerecorded software in support of the format when it was introduced to consumers in 1987."

Source: http://www.riaa.com/issues/audio/history.asp

We never had general consumer distribution of digital audio tapes becuase of the RIAA (and similar groups). We never got past analog.

Note that they did not prevent CDR's from being produced, which clearly are used for a wide variety of essential applications.

What else would they be opposed to? HDTV (if they owned video rights, they would be)? Digital Music?

The Web Was Small

Back then, there were reportedly only 100 web pages in the world. No one talked about web "sites" back then, they were just pages. Yahoo was 1 web page with less than 100 links. Word of mouth made Yahoo popular.

Most people went to USENET to spend their leisure time. Everything you get out of a blog or any other news source was posted in USENET.

FTP was used for file storage. This is of course before the P2P sharing networks. So anything that was in any way pirated or illegal was stored on FTP sites.

Since the web had a nicer interface, people slowly started to use the web for linking to files on FTP (and later HTTP) sites. This is when the RIAA started complaining about how the web was used for sharing illegal files, and they argued that since the web had no legal commercial use, it should be shut down.

HTTP vs P2P

Everyone knows that the only difference between HTTP and Peer 2 Peer is that HTTP is 1 centralized peer transmitting to another, while P2P is multiple decentralized peers transmitting to another. What is the legal significance of one single origin point vs multiple origin points? Absolutely none. There is absolutely no legal significance whatsoever in the technology used by P2P networks.

Any service can be used to transfer files. At this time P2P has many benefits over HTTP, mainly in improving transfer times when a single pipe is overused, and adding redundancy at the expense of consistent distribution. P2P is the future of the web; all web sites will benefit by one day using P2P technology.

The DNS system is a perfect example of how multiple peers are used as remote services. Yes, DNS data may not be consistent from server to server, but it added critically needed redundancy and reliability.

Akamai uses multiple peers, spread globally, to improve delivery performance of its clients web sites, much like P2P networks.

Failed Business Models

Before the invention of recorded media, the only way for a musician to earn money was at a live performance. When recorded media was invented, everyone thought it would be the end of the performance industry. New business models had to be formed to permit recorded media.

Now, we have the ability for consumers to acquire and record onto their own media. This requires that the music industry create a new business model to deal with advancing technology; stifling technology is not the answer. It is not the consumer's fault that the RIAA has not developed a new business model to permit consumers to use the latest technology.

Conclusion

The RIAA is absolutely, positively wrong in claiming that P2P networks do not have a right to exist. P2P networks (such as Akamai) have proven their worth as DNS servers and global caching servers. Stifling P2P network growth will only stifle technological advancement and commerce.

Related articles:

September 26 1992:
"DAT has been slow to gain ground because (1)
there hasn't been sufficient support for the medium up to now (but in
discussing the shortcomings of the minidisk, Sony has reaffirmed its
support for DAT as a high end medium) and (2) That obnoxious SCMS
system which the RIAA extorted into the machines. "
source

Dec 21 1993:
"the National Music Publishers Association has filed a class-action lawsuit against CompuServe for copyright infringement on behalf of 140 Music Publishers. The main focus of the suit is Compuserve's MIDI Forum. The suit defines every download as a single infringment, and by seeking $100K in damages for each infringment, the damages would amount to over a BILLION dollars should the suit be successful. "
source

May 15 1993:"I'm not surprised at all. I expected something like this to happen, and
predict that the RIAA will eventually try to get legislation passed banning
sale of used CDs in the US. "
source

2006:
"Lawyer: RIAA wants to shut down the Internet"
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/8177.cfm

2006:
"RIAA Legal Ruling Could Shut Down The Internet"
http://infowars.com/articles/ps/internet_riaa_ruling_could_shut_down_net.htm