RIAA Secret Meeting

[Greg Newby]

Astounding quotes from Hilary Rosen:

	"The drop in CD sales can be directly attributed to the new generation
	of file swapping services.  Because of their de-centralized nature, it
	is impossible to determine whether usage has surpassed that of Napster
	at its heyday."

gbn translation: "Even though CD sales have increased, they haven't
increased as much as we dreamed.  Therefore, we need to blame
something we can't even measure.  The only sound alternative
is to consider that our lowest-common-denominator pablum-puking
crappy products simply suck."
	
     	"We must ask that the safeharbor provision of the DMCA be
	removed.  Because of the magnitude of the
	problem, Internet service providers can no longer be shielded 
	from the wrath of the law." 

gbn translation: "I am the law" (spoken with a Judge Dredd sneer)

	"Once we stem piracy, we will be able to raise prices in order to
	regain lost profits from piracy."

gbn translation: "If we're unable to stem piracy, we will need
to raise prices to fight piracy better."

I'm a little worried that "Anonymous" misspelled Hilary Rosen's name,
but at least he/she got the gender right
(http://images.google.com/images?q=Hilary+Rosen) for pics.

The only remaining question is whether the fact of the meeting
can be verified via other sources.

  -- Greg

On Mon, Oct 08, 2001 at 11:24:40PM -0700, John Young wrote:
> 
> Anonymous reports on a secret meeting of RIAA:
> 
>    http://cryptome.org/riaa-secret.htm
> 
> Excerpt:
> 
> "On Thursday October 4 there was a closed-door RIAA meeting at the
> Ritz-Carlton, which was 'a direction setting' meeting. The individuals of
> note attending were:
> 
>   Hillary Rosen - RIAA Chief
>   Steve Heckler - Sony Music
>   Strauss Zelnick - BMG
>   Edgar Bronfman - Universal
>   Gerald Levin - AOL Time-Warner
>   Ken Berry - EMI
>   Leonardo Chiariaglione - SDMI Chair (Leaving Soon)
>   Francis Jones - Codex Data Systems
>   Fritz Hollings - Senator
>   Ted Stevens - Senator
>   Michael Eisner - Disney CEO
>   Jack Valenti - President, MPAA
>   Andy Grove - Intel CEO
>   Lou Gerstner - IBM
>   Yoishi Morishita - CEO Matsushita
>   Tsutomo Kawata - CEO Toshiba
>   Jay Berman - IFPI Chair
>   Paul England - Microsoft Advanced Cryptography research group
> 
> One particularly disturbing fact is that Codex Data System's DIRT 
> software is supposed to be restricted to law enforcement agencies, 
> yet the RIAA, MPAA, and IFPI have all purchased it, and use it 
> routinely to monitor servers which are suspected of infringing 
> content, yet are password protected such as servers which 
> require one to sign up for a password account like hotline servers
> that have no guest download."