September 13, 2003
RIAA rant
So, I've been watching the whole RIAA story unfold (in which the Recording Industry Association of America sued 261 people for swapping and sharing music).
It's funny how things have changed in the digital age. In my teenage years, it was common for my friends and I to swap tapes of music, or to make compilation tapes for each other, or to tape music off the radio and think nothing of it.
Nowadays computers make this much easier with the ability to make digital copies of CDs, to make your own CDs, and peer-to-peer file swapping programs like Napster, Kazaa, Limewire and so on, which let you effortlessly share your digital copies.
I think the problem facing the music industry is threefold:
- Firstly, the audio quality of swapped music is near-perfect, so the urge to go out and buy an original because the tape recording is bad has diminished. The record companies want your usage of the music you buy to fit within very narrow confines: a CD played on your stereo, and that's it. Thom and I had a big argument with a record company lawyer once on the issue of making digital copies of CDs for personal use. For example, I'd like all my music on my laptop hard drive so I can listen to it at home, at work, or on the road - without carrying a stack of shiny CDs around with me. If the recording industry could copy-protect CDs, they would. They don't believe you can make personal copies and not share them.
- Secondly, the whole world is now your peer - rather than swapping music with your mates, you can now download albums from someone on the other side of the world that you've never met, often before they are even released. You can also get albums that are not released in your own country, rather than paying the hefty markup often charged for imports.
- Finally, the music industry has used up all the good will it could ever have had with money-grabbing racketeering and price-fixing. Given behaviour like that, and now suing 12year olds, is it no wonder people don't want to buy music from them any more?
I think this cartoon nicely sums up most people's opinions on the matter.
Posted by savs at September 13, 2003 1:05 PM