Posted on 08/03/2003 6:02:20 PM PDT by vanderleun
THIS HOLIDAY SEASON
You have to be utterly unconnected to everything not to have noticed that the recording industry, represented by RIAA, has decided to get medieval on its customer base. The latest moronic move by this organization to halt P2P file sharing is a deluge of subpoenas and lawsuits designed to 'really teach music downloaders a lesson.'
Will it work? It will for those unfortunate enough to "win" this Lawsuit Lottery. Nothing like the prospect of large legal bills and crippling fines to make the "bad" consumers of music see the error of their ways.
Is it fair? Not by a long shot. The Register estimates that it will take RIAA over 2,000 years to sue everybody at the current rate.
Is it sane? The RIAA thinks it is very sane to attack, at random, individuals, and to take a look at their hard drives to see if there was ever a track downloaded that the person under their guns still has somewhere.
Well, if that is the case, who among us will escape hanging?
And while you are contemplating that, contemplate whether or not you want to allow a tactic that lets any government or business interest start poking around on your computer on the basis of information gathered from your ISP go unopposed.
Are you sure all those "accidentally" collected jpegs are really expunged?
Would you prefer to balance your checkbook the old fashioned way? How about your online bank account? Any copies of that floating around along with letters to your significant other?
That (journal entry) (unsent email) about your boss, your lover, President Bush... is that really erased or hidden so that it can never be recovered?
Not a pretty picture, is it?
Think of this RIAA tactic as "random cyberterrorism with lawyers." It stinks. It is part of the axis of evil interests determined to control your online behavior. And it is a very dangerous precedent. What's more, looked at from any reasonable perspective, it is merely the last in a series of attempts by the executives behind RIAA to save their cushy jobs and perks. That, at bottom, is all it is. This possibility that all these lawsuits will add a dime to the royalty checks of the musicians it is said to represent is close to zero.
If these litigation junkies at the RIAA could wake up from their money induced dementia and smell the coffee of online micropayments and the clear signals from Apple's online music store, they'd find billions more in revenue than they are currently seeing from grinding out half-baked albums and pricing them into the stratosphere.
But they can't wake up. They need to be shaken.
What I'd like to see happen, so that the RIAA and the recording industry deeply understands that suing people at random is VERY BAD FOR BUSINESS is a Web wide boycott on CDs as holiday gifts in 2003.
It is simple and it will be, if broadly based enough, effective. It simply targets the one season of the year when all the recording companies are hoping to make a killing in sales. What would happen if those sales fell dramatically? They might get the message that while downloading music that you don't pay for is wrong, destroying individuals financially at random is equally wrong.
It has something to do with that old adage about: "Two wrongs don't make a right."
Yes, just that simple and sometimes simple ideas are strong ideas.
My idea, simply put: NO CDs FOR THE HOLIDAYS. WEB TO RIAA: TWO WRONGS DON'T MAKE A RIGHT.
Pass it on.
If the Web can get their attention, perhaps we can help them kick their addiction to lawyers at the same time we kick out addiction to "free" downloads of music.
P.S. Can someone design a nifty little ribbon and button for this campaign? Gotta have a ribbon and a button you know.
Resources: The Electronic Frontier Foundation is out in front on this issue. Reid Stout at Photodude.com is a sane man about this issue. The Inquirer gives you an idea of the reality of this issue.
let me get this straight: they see you downloading a file, then they hack your pc and peruse your files to see if you actually kept it somewhere?
I have no problem with copyrights being a fair bit longer than patents, but I've seen nothing to suggest that 28+28 was insufficient to encourage writers and composers; I object strongly to the notion of incredibly long copyrights being automatic, since it has lead and will continue to lead to the creation of countless copyright orphans--works for which no use is, or ever will be, legally possible beyond the personal enjoyment of people who happen to possess copies. For some works, there may be some people who know that they have, but do not expect there to be enough demand to make it worthwhile to publish that fact. For other works, there is nobody alive in the world today who knows the copyright status.
Prior to the copyright act of 1976, the situation was somewhat manageable: if someone had copyrighted a work at least 28 years ago, and if no registration or renewal was on file, the work was in the public domain. Since published works to be copyrighted had to include the year of publication in a copyright notice, this usually meant anybody interested in a work would be able to know when it entered the public domain.
The 1976 act, however, changed all that. Nowadays, if someone encounters a work and knows only that it was published in or before 1980, that work could still be copyrighted 150 years later even if no further copyright extensions are passed. If the author of that work was born in 1960 and lives to be 100, the copyright will continue until 70 years after his death--2130. To be sure, it would be likely that by 2100 or so one could probably get by with using the work without permission (if one still happened to have a usable copy). But one couldn't be sure that the heirs of the original author or composer wouldn't pop out of the woodwork with a lawsuit. The irony is that the works that under the old rules would have lapsed into the public domain soonest (28 years after publication) may be those which under the new rules never do.
Of course, this is all to promote progress in the sciences and useful arts.
Whew! I checked the list, and I guess it's OK for me to buy that Badlees album I've been wantin'!
I actually wouldn't have a problem with copyrights that could be extended out to 96 years, if such extension actually required work and investment on the part of the copyright holder. If a company had to file copyright renewals every 16 years, that would do a lot to mitigate the problem of "copyright orphans", which to my mind are the biggest tragedy of the 1976 copyright act and its successors.
Though what I'd rather see would be a law providing that Mickey Mouse shall protected under copyright into perpetuity on condition that the Sony Bono copyright act be repealed and no effort be made to reinstate it. Think Disney would go for that?
I'll be buying some classical CDs this week, and I'll make sure the record company is a RIAA member before making my purchases.
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