Recently documents came into the public realm that show some of the RIAA’s financial dealings in 2008. Apparently they have decided that, like their credibility, they need to throw away their money as well. I am referring to files recently released by P2Pnet that show:
“The RIAA paid Holmes Roberts & Owen $9,364,901 in 2008, Jenner & Block more than $7,000,000, and Cravath Swain & Moore $1.25 million, to pursue its “copyright infringement” claims, in order to recover a mere $391,000. [ps there were many other law firms feeding at the trough too; these were just the ones listed among the top 5 independent contractors.]”
Wow, talk about a bad return on investment. It looks as though, not only is it not the artists getting rich off of the RIAA lawsuits, but even the RIAA isn’t getting rich off of the RIAA lawsuits! As always though, the lawyers are profiting handsomely.
If you don’t want to do the math, that’s $17.6 million plus spent to gain back $391,000. Although no documents exist (that can be found in public) showing how much of this $391,000 went to the artists, I think it’s a fairly safe bet that it was little or none.
The math gets no better if you look at previous years. In fact, it gets laughably worse. Over the the three year period of 2006-2008 the total legal fees paid out by the RIAA is a staggering $64,000,000 to get back $1,361,000.
More bad news for the RIAA recently surfaced as well, in the form of former Pink Floyd manager Peter Jenner. Jenner has been speaking out about filesharing being, more or less, unstoppable and not really a problem, saying, instead, that the music industry needs to find a way to take advantage of it.
While I, in no way, condone stealing intellectual property, I also have thought for a long time that the industry is out of control and that suing fans is no way to fix their outdated business model. Instead of trying to cling to their antiquated ways, the music industry needs to move ahead and look, as Jenner said, into ways of taking advantage of modern technology. They took a baby-step when they dropped DRM, but now it’s time for them to learn to walk and then run. And maybe it’s also time for them to drop, and disavow, the RIAA.