FITUG e.V. Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft

FC: The Register reluctantly admits RIAA "secret meeting

------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 00:35:58 -0400 From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: politech@politechbot.com Subject: FC: The Register reluctantly admits RIAA "secret meeting" was hoax Send reply to: declan@well.com

It was the perfect, evil-music-industry story: A clandestine meeting where chieftans from AOL Time Warner, RIAA, SDMI, Disney, Intel, and even U.S. senators sat down to decide how to stop piracy, embrace copy-protection technology, and generally screw over American consumers.

The Register got the tip from an anonymous source, and immediately turned it into an article. It said: "The RIAA hosted a secret meeting in Washington DC with the heads of major record labels and technology companies, plus leaders of other trade bodies and even members of the US senate." (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/22087.html).

It would have been a tremendous scoop for the website -- and would have been vital information that the public deserved to know.

The only problem: It was a hoax. The purported "meeting" was a fabrication, spoof, and fantasy. It never took place.

I don't typically criticize fellow journalists -- we all make mistakes, we never have as much information as we'd like, and deadlines are always too early -- but this article is beyond the pale. Instead of checking to see whether the alleged participants were still employed by their respective companies (some weren't), spending two minutes on the phone asking RIAA whether it happened, or using the barest glimmerings of journalistic sense, the Register credulously reported fiction as fact.

In a grudging retraction on Wednesday, the paper compounded its problems by beginning its article with this line: "The trouble with the Internet is that it's just too darn fast." (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/31/22138.html)

No, the trouble has nothing to do with the Internet. It has everything to do with shoddy journalism. Worse yet, the halfhearted retraction still argued, pitifully and implausibly, that the quotes supplied by Anonymous "may" still be accurate. An update to the original article, instead of saying forthrightly we-were-hoaxed, instead allowed only that "our source may not be all he or she claimed to be." Right.

Caveat lector.

-Declan

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