Recording Industry Face Another Possible Antitrust Lawsuit

[gitreel]

I found this at arstechnica. The riaa just can't stay out of trouble.

Posted July 15, 2004 @ 8:07 PM
by Fred "zAmboni" Locklear

The recording industry is familiar with antitrust legislation. They have been found guilty of price fixing and recently have been and have dodged a Department of Justice probe and a Sharman Networks lawsuit. Sharman Networks received the go ahead earlier this year to file new antitrust claims against the recording and movie industries, and now, there may be further antitrust suits filed in the near future.

After they were found not responsible for their end users' actions, Grokster, and other P2P companies formed P2P United, a lobbying group looking to gain respectability while trying to establish themselves as legitimate businesses. While the lobbying group may be planting seeds in Washington, efforts to build relationships with the recording industry and other distributors have failed. According to record and P2P insiders, the labels have blacklisted file sharing companies and have pressured distributors against doing businesses with them lest they may find their supply cut off.

"UMI have expressed concern about our relationship with your company and even though we are providing you with a legitimate service they will not license music to Wippit if we have any dealings with your company who they consider 'pirates'," Wippit CEO Paul Myers wrote Grokster in a May 2003 e-mail.

The record labels have also put up barriers that StreamCast Networks (owner of Morpheus) could not avoid in negotiations with RealNetworks and other download services. Even though StreamCast and Grokster have been vindicated by the courts, the industry does not want their material being sold on networks where other copies of their copyrighted material are being downloaded without permission. With roadblocks found down every possible business avenue, representatives of file sharing networks feel this is a coordinated effort to lock them out.

"If the last names of the CEOs of most major record labels ended in a vowel they'd be calling this behavior racketeering," said former Grokster president Wayne Rosso.

But do the industry's actions rise to the level of racketeering or other antitrust violations? According to one expert, as long as each label acts on their own accord they should be in the clear. With the outlook dim on reaching deals that would merit approval from the record labels, the file sharing companies could soon be turning to the courts with charges the labels are colluding to shut them out.

http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/20040715-3998.html

It is also on yahoo

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040715/wr_nm/med

[Greg12]

I dont think they'll win, the labels do have the option from withdrawing from the RIAA.

If you could prove the RIAA intemidates or otherwise illegal works to keep the labels with them, then u could sue for that