While conducting research on another issue, our researchers came across an article in Forbes Magazine from July 11, 1997 about music piracy.  What stands out to us is the fact that the RIAA has not changed its tactics for over ten years.

First, the problem back in 1997, from the article Song Pirates:

RIAA estimates that record companies lose $300 million a year in the U.S. alone to illegally copied cassettes and bootleg CDs, and as the technology to download music off the Internet advances, online piracy may end up costing the industry billions more. Last year, 1.1 million counterfeit cassettes and more than 200,000 CDs were seized in the U.S. But with the introduction of a new compression system called MPEG-1 Layer 3, or MP3 for short–available as freeware over the net–it’s now possible to stash whole CDs on off-the-shelf hard drives.

So how did the RIAA deal with this new distribution channel called the Internet?

So far, RIAA’s response has been to juice up its antipiracy division and, in June, went to court to shut down three of the more “egregious” illegal music archive sites–with promises of more to follow. “If the Internet goes unchecked,” Hilary Rosen, RIAA president, told Forbes Digital Tool, “the very medium that’s supposed to bring creative outlets to music will end up killing it.” Record companies like Geffen, which has been waging its own quiet campaign against illegal music archive sites, and Oasis, a British rock group whose management, in May, warned fans about posting copyrighted sound and video clips of the band on web sites, have already jumped into the fray.

According to a record executive quoted in the story, the record companies were shutting down 100 percent of the pirates the were going after.

Which is why Jim Griffin, Geffen Record’s technology director, is on a mission to make the Internet a pirate-free zone; usually, he says, all it takes to convince most pirates to cease and desist is a warning letter. “The reason we go after pirates is to clean up the Internet for commerce, otherwise, anarchy reigns. They’re not hard to find: We just plug ‘MP3′ into a search engine and go after the first site we come to. Every pirate we’ve gone after, we’ve caught.”

Currently, the RIAA estimates losses of $4.5 billion, a 1,400 percent increase from the 1997 estimate.