Recently a fifth RIAA lawyer was added to the U.S Justice Department despite the objections of public interest groups, trade pacts and library coalitions.

This would be the RIAA celebrating the fact a federal appeals court has barred a live webcast of the ongoing Joel Tenenbaum trial in a victory for repressing information. After all, if you’ve sued 30,000 people without managing to make the slightest dent in society, then you might be a little embarrased by the public seeing your claims in court.

So here’s the money-saving, music industry-saving answer:

Stop hiring lawyers, and instead start hiring prominent P2P users to implement solutions based on common sense rather than legality and protectionism.

Sounds like madness?

Since the four defendants were found guilty in the The Pirate Bay trial, membership of Sweden’s Pirate Party has shot up – including 3000 new members in the first few hours after the decision.

Over 100,000 people have already signed up, pre-launch, for IPredator, the Pirate Bay’s new service to hide IP addresses from authorities, with the Pirate Bay not logging any data to avoid having anything to turn over to authorities.

A new study from Norway has shown illegal file sharers are more likely to buy music from legitimate sources than other web users.

Not only that, but the illegal file sharers buy 10 times more music than other web users, using iTunes and Amazon.

And this echoes a study by the Canadian Record Industry Association in 2006, with three out of four file sharers buying tracks they’d previously downloaded illegally.

Quoting selectively from Umair Haque on his Harvard Business School blog:

‘No business has a right to profit, sell, or even to produce. All are privileges that society grants businesses.’

‘every time the music industry kills an underground distribution channel, a more efficient one arises in its place. Goodbye mixtapes, hello www. Bye www, hello Napster. Bye Napster, hi BitTorrent. Bye BitTorrent, hi anonymous, ciphered, totally decentralized p2p nets.’

‘Why? By limiting the supply of interaction, the music industry is only ensuring that each interaction becomes more and more efficient. The endgame is a distribution system where every song in the world in the world can be zapped invisibly and anonymously from me to you in a nanosecond.

The point? 21st century economics are radically decentralized. Wars against networks are unwinnable — when orthodox organizations are the ones fighting them. Only networks (or markets and communities, if you’re a long-time reader) can fight other networks.

Want a better music/media/etc. “business model”? The understanding that hierarchies are dominated by networks is the key — and the failure to understand it is exactly why the media industry is so deeply in decay.’

It includes Google in China, Orange, TDC, Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, T-Mobile, Netcom, STIM, and possibly Warner Music Group.

He also links back to his excellent post and presentation on The Future Revenues for Content Creators: Attention Revenues Up, Copy Revenues Down.

Both posts are essential reading!

The Daily Mail writes:

“Zavvi, formerly the Virgin Megastore chain, called in administrators Ernst & Young after it was crippled by the collapse of Woolworths’ Entertainment UK wholesale division.”

Read the full article here.

It won’t stop there…..more to follow. Literally.

“We simply cannot accept terms that fail to appropriately and fairly compensate recording artists, songwriters, labels and publishers for the value they provide.” (via Brand Republic)

Ignore, for the moment, the fact that by pulling all their videos, they’ve almost invited Google to pull all their search results (Sometimes it’s a real shame the company claims to ‘do no evil’)

Ironically just four hours later Universal Music was featured on Cnet as making ‘tens of millions of dollars from Youtube’, according to Executive VP, Rio Caraeff:

“(YouTube) is not like radio, where it’s just promotional,” said Caraeff, who heads up Universal’s digital group. “It’s a revenue stream, a commercial business. It’s growing tremendously. It’s up almost 80 percent for us year-over-year in the U.S. in terms of our revenue from this category.”

“Certainly, in the last year the rise of free to consumer ad-supported video has become a very significant part of our business coming from a variety of areas,” Caraeff said. “YouTube is driving a very large quantity of that… We have a great relationship with YouTube, and the future for us will be more than with YouTube than we’re doing today.

“We’re working with them on a variety of new concepts and new businesses to take the groundwork we’ve done in the last year and half and do a lot more with it,” he added. “I wouldn’t expect to see us just do business with YouTube like we used to do.”

The estimate from a ‘music industry source’ is almost $100 million from music streaming across the web.

And then Stan Schroeder eloquently sums up on Mashable why a rumoured Hulu-type video portal for Sony BMG, EMI, Universal Musica Group and Warner would be a monumental wast of time and effort.

The drum beat you hear is that of consumers who want to be able to enjoy, spread, love, talk about, share, promote, remember, and most of all, buy into the event and joy of music, hitting their heads repeatedly on their keyboards, laptops, MP3 players and Smartphones.

ISPs would collect the micropayments, which would then be given out to copyright holders by an independant non-profit organisation called Choruss. Only Universal is yet to sign up from the four major labels, and the offer is being shopped around U.S universities including Cornell, Columbia and the University of Chicago.

Here’s the interesting bit in the words of Wired:

In return for a university paying fees to Choruss, its students would be able to continue downloading as they have been — bit torrent, Limewire and so on — without fear of legal reprisal. Unlike previous plans that require the use of onerous digital rights management, this one would allow students to download music in the unprotected formats they prefer, using the hardware, software and networks of their choice.

Could this be the long-awaited innovation in the face of extinction? It’s an interesting proposition, and one which presumably accepts DRM-free files will be shared, traded, uploaded etc. And will probably end up in the hands on non-students, who won’t have ever paid any fees?

If so, I’ll be stunned.

I await the first time it launches, and the discovery within a week of some kind of tracking or limitation. If it does turn out to be true, it does prove that anyone can change if they’re heading for a big enough disaster. Repent, ye industry sinners.

(There’s also the small flaw of those students and families complaining that fees intended to pay for an education are now being diverted to an entertainment industry, and the rush of film and media companies to include their own fees.

Plus complaints by those who don’t intend to download any music and resent paying for others.

Plus the eternal question of why on earth music labels deserve to take any of the money in the first place – because in this model, they don’t actually do anything?

Look again:

1. Universities charge students.

2. ISPs collect payment.

3. Organisation collects electronic data and distributes it to copyright holders (Surely the musicians and artists who created the work).

Exactly where in this 3 step plan do we have a need for record companies? Give the non-profit organisation the ability to enforce copyright if a musician wants to, and that’s the music labels gone.

But the report also claims full music tracks will only make half of that figure, with ringtones and other items contributing half. And the author of the report, Christine Binns goes on to say:

“Paying for music is progressively becoming a niche activity as the value of recorded music is already in steep, possibly terminal, decline. Bundled music attempts to tackle this problem head-on, providing a way for every player in the value chain to benefit. Even offering music for ‘free’ at point of delivery is not going to be enough to ensure uptake of the service – the customer experience and handset design have to be right if mobile music services are to become lasting propositions.”

Mobile music subscriptions are predicted to hit £721 million in 2012, almost double the £408 million predicted for full individual tracks. And the report goes on to say that it’s almost impossible to compete with iTunes.

See here for the full report: Mobile music: It’s got to be free.

Now might be a good time for the music industry to start panicking. Not only do you have to give away your music for nothing – but even that might not force people to listen!