With Friends Like These, Who Needs an RIAA?

by Howard Wyman

The Recording Industry Association of America started off innocently enough. It began with technology, and finding ways to help us use it. By the late 1940s, a variety of materials and over a hundred different methods were being used to manufacture and calibrate the sound imparted to gramophone records—which affected durability as well as how the machines read the sound—and resulted in records that needed to be played at different speeds, that lasted different lengths of time, and were of different levels of fidelity. In what seems today like a strangely non-capitalistic move, rather than conduct corporate espionage against one another to gain the secrets of each in order to create a single best product and dominate the industry, the various companies collectively decided upon a need for standardization in the way gramophone records were produced. They pooled their tech-savvy, coronated polyvinyl chloride as king plastic of the record biz, and, in the early 1950s, threw their combined weight into the establishment of the “RIAA equalization curve” as the de facto global industry standard for how sound is carved into the grooves of a record to achieve the best fidelity, longest running time, and least wear upon the needle or the plastic itself. It had nothing to do with public persecution, alienating music fans, or ruining lives, as it’s most famous for today. In fact, it empowered fans, made it easier for them to consume music from a variety of sources, and therefore improved the professional lives of artists and companies as well. What went wrong?

If one takes the trade group’s altruistic self-description at face value, one could chalk its descent up to human nature, as if the RIAA’s sole original intention was to please people and help artists, and then something changed. The RIAA didn’t invent the idea of “gold records,” after all (that was RCA, pre-RIAA, in 1942). In 1958, however—hot on the heels of the instatement of the curve—the RIAA trademarked the term, and became the official organization to monitor and celebrate sales. The reality is that the potential was always there, and it was only a matter of time until the closed-door nature of technology would be unlocked and result in a large enough dip in sales to expose the ugliness inherent to the RIAA’s enormous power. Yet even with the advent of file-sharing, the RIAA’s snowballing freefall into the no-holds-barred defense of the record industry’s bottom line has been staggering to behold, culminating in to one of the most reviled public industrial entities of modern history, embroiling itself in mean-spirited lawsuits against children, the elderly, handicapped, widowed, computerless, homeless, and in at least one case, even the deceased.

Recently, in what many have taken as the rare silver lining in the midst of the current global financial crisis, the RIAA announced that just shy of 30 percent of its staff has either resigned or been laid off, and will not be replaced. It’s possible that all its costly litigation has taken a toll on its resources over the years, or perhaps the universally negative press was enough to win some dissension in the ranks. They would prefer us to believe that it’s no more than a symptom of the recession, although the question might not be a matter of “what went wrong” at all. In the context of subverted justice as served by the RIAA, this restructuring could very well be symptomatic of what went right.

In their rigorous defense of profits dressed up as artists’ populism in the past 10 years, the RIAA’s arsenal of legal eagles really proved its mettle—enough for its stars to get poached by other organizations that enjoy a posture of representing “the people” while in effect only furthering the interests of the entrenched powers that be. Specifically, team players like Don Verrilli, who trounced Grokster in court for the RIAA in 2005, and Tom Perrelli, whose firm slurped $1,000/hr from the RIAA coffers for its services in attempting to force ISPs to reveal file-sharers’ identities without judges’ permission, have both been appointed to the Obama administration’s Department of Justice. Verrilli’s other achievements include arguing the famous charge against Jammie Thomas in the RIAA’s first case to be tried before a jury, which came very close to resulting in the Native American single mother of two being skewered with a $222,000 fine. Perrelli, meanwhile, was also the music-lovin’ lawyer to convince the US Copyright Board to essentially kill free internet radio by mandating insurmountable, retroactive per-play fees for songs. And yet, the RIAA’s ascension doesn’t stop with these two champs. There’s also David Ogden, who, back in 2002, helped defend the Mickey Mouse Protection Act (more officially known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act) in the landmark case of Eldred v. Ashcroft. Ogden was appointed to the Number Two post in the DOJ, answering only to the guy that defended Chiquita Brands International in the civil case that followed the corporation’s pleading guilty to arming, funding, and setting loose a terrorist militia to guard its fruit plantations. (Real “man of the people,” that Eric Holder.) Perrelli, as Associate Attorney General, is the Number Three guy, which puts Verrilli in a tie with Neil MacBride (another fierce copyright enforcer from the business software world) for fourth place as a pair of Associate Deputy Attorneys General.

Given what a vocal, net-stranglin’ supporter of the RIAA our VP Joe Biden has always been, the nature of these appointments is not terribly surprising. The Obama/Biden campaign didn’t rake in over eight million dollars of entertainment industry donations just for being cool, after all. Biden does want to tax and filter the internet, and did sponsor an RIAA-backed bill that would restrict “taping off the radio” as it were, regarding songs from internet and satellite radio sources. He sponsored another that attempted (yet thankfully failed) to make it a felony to use personal devices to undo DRM. Most tellingly, in 2002, Biden signed a letter that urged the DOJ to make the RIAA’s ultimate dream a reality—to spend taxpayers’ money and waste government time to prosecute P2P file-sharers.

What started with Biden taking office and continued with these subsequent appointments might well be entering its endgame with the latest news of the RIAA’s downsizing (in addition to similar news regarding layoffs at the Motion Picture Association of America). The RIAA has steadily made significant headway in transforming its lust for cash and control into actual, federal policy to be enforced not by ugly, expensive industry lawsuits, but by the government itself. In the meantime, the layoffs have spurred some speculation that the industry group plans to merge with its European counterpart (the IFPI, International Federation of the Phonographic Industry). Should that prove to be true, one might further speculate that the resulting anti-piracy/pro-copyright/net-deregulating landscape could very well take the form of this international body of electronic investigation, sanctioned and enforced by the Obama administration and other industry-friendly governments, protecting the interests of the state as well as those of big business, and doing so at the expense of individual rights to freedom, privacy, expression, and communication. Eh. We’re already fed, clothed, and otherwise unhealthily sustained by the sweat of the Chinese—might as well model our internet policies after theirs while we’re at it.