RIAA demonstrates how not only to alienate customers by suing them, but to lose money while doing so:
During an occasionally testy cross examination, a Sony executive said what many observers have suspected for a long time. The RIAA's four-year-old lawsuit campaign is costing the music industry millions of dollars and is a big money-loser for the record labels. The revelation came during the first day of Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas, the first file-sharing case to go to trial (it was formerly known as Virgin v. Thomas, but the sole Virgin Records track was stricken from the complaint, making Capitol Records the lead plaintiff).
— RIAA anti-P2P campaign a real money pit, according to testimony, By Eric Bangeman, ars technica, October 02, 2007 - 11:40PM CT
I don't quite understand how this is good for anybody, except maybe iTunes. As risk management goes, it's about as negative as it gets.
-jsq
From a strategic view, one could see that a stick can help sell a carrot. The problem is the price of the carrot is now zero, so no balance can ever be achieved.
Posted by: Iang | October 19, 2007 at 06:39 AM
Hey John,
The RSS Feed for this post came through as a "div" declaration...
FYI
Posted by: Alex | October 19, 2007 at 07:06 AM
That's odd. It's one of the simplest posts I've ever made, format-wise. I don't see anything unusual in it.
Ugh: starting October 3, all my posts seem to come out in RSS as the HTML encoding. I didn't change anything in how I'm posting them, and they're normal when viewed via the blog's own web pages, so I'm guessing it's a typepad bug. I'll send in a bug report.
Thanks for the find.
Posted by: jsqrisk | October 19, 2007 at 11:41 AM