Originally Posted By: eddie1261
One thing we agree on is attacking a senior citizen community that holds 6 events per year is a huge pile of manure, that choice of words made in deference to the filter the forums have that would have inserted asterisks where I defined it as what falls out of the south end of a northbound bull.

Bars that have bands 6 nights a week, I get that. But this? It's not like they are recording the shows and selling them. And in my opinion, that is where the line is. If I put out 30 songs and somebody wants to pay them 10 times each, I see that as a business opportunity in that it might generate CD sales. The only complaint I would have is if someone resold my stuff for a profit and didn't pay me. That would be that same stuff from the bull.....

They should absolutely have a lawyer involved. If ASCAP is so soulless that they go after this low hanging fruit, they need to be stopped.

I worked at a law firm once that had a private server for the IT people to use where we could put our own music so we didn't have to bring CDs in every day and risk scratching them up. Each user had the password to the server, and the rules were that each user's directory had to be password protected. So for Joe to get to Mary's music, he would need Mary's password. To the best of my knowledge nobody shared passwords, thus nobody copied tracks. Somehow the RIAA got wind of it. They sent lawyers in to grill everybody who had a folder. As you can probably imagine from my "edge" on display here, my interview was, at the very least, entertaining and fiery. On and on they went about the evils of file sharing. I sat there and said "I agree." They then asked why I participated, to which I responded "You have just made an accusation based solely on your supposition that I share the music in my folder. And to supposition, I say that you are going to have to prove that I allowed anybody to share my music. Also, are you aware that the music in my folder is MY music? Songs I have written, performed and copyrighted? So tell me, why you think you have the right to tell me what I can and can't do with songs to which I own the copyright?" (Insert the amount of expletives you can be sure were included. Again..... asterisks.)

That ended my interview.

I hate bureaucracy in any form.


Funny, but I have always thought that IT people are the most soulless bureaucrats on earth It takes a special kind of rules guy to turn a Personal Computer into a machine that can only be modified by people with administrative credentials.

Former RIAA employee here. Although our people may have told you that they were investigating file sharing among your small group, it was probably a cover story to throw the employees off what they actually knew. We didn't ever look at a small group of friends sharing files. That would have been a waste of resources. If we zeroed in on an IT department, you can bet that we traced a peer to peer file sharing operation back to your IP address and were trying to discover who was running it. That is the kind of large scale piracy that we could justify going after. Someone who started giving me a hard time and cussing me out would have gotten an extra hard look right after I turned a recorded copy of my interview over to his employer.

Sandra McG