The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is at it again. It's kind of cute the way they delude themselves, isn't it?
The RIAA announced last week its intention to prosecute those who are sharing "substantial" quantities of music files. They placed an ad in papers across the country that read, "The next time you or you kids share music on the Internet, you may also want to download a list of attorneys."
In other words, you'd better stop downloading music or you're in big trouble. They mean it this time. Really!
When are these guys going to get it?
I don't dispute that a recorded song is intellectual property. I don't dispute that file-sharing is theft. I dispute the idea that it can be regulated, let alone stopped.
The truth is they will never stop us from stealing music off of the Internet. We have tasted the fruit and we find it quite delectable. We'll import it from Guatemala, if we have to.
Music is free now and forever.
Yet the RIAA persists. They threaten to hack our computers with no repercussions for the damage they do when they hack. They threaten to encrypt the files to keep them from being copied.
Every time they hack a computer, some file thief will devise a firewall. Every time they encrypt a file, some script kiddie will have a crack out in 48 hours. The RIAA is fighting an idealistic battle they cannot win.
Not only that, they are fighting an idealistic battle they created. For too long the RIAA helped the music industry jack-up CD prices. CD sales didn't drop because of file sharing. CD sales dropped because good music wasn't being made accessible to us, and what was being made accessible came at too high a price. It was supply and demand -- capitalism at work.
The industry was paying its poor, starving artists millions of dollars. They were selling millions of discs, with a profit of ten dollars apiece in some cases.
Why should our culture accept this? Our culture comes from a time of free, unadulterated music on the radio. Downloading a file is no different. The sound quality suffers and the afterglow of seeing the album art in your hand is absent. We buy the albums of the bands we love because we want to officially own a piece of them. The rest we listen to on the radio or the Internet.
I don't feel bad for the artists who no longer can make a living selling music. If they want to be artists, they can make art for art's sake. If they want to make money, I hear Hiatt Printing is hiring part-time.
So here is what I say to the RIAA: Fix your product. Stop with the multi-million dollar contracts for commercial artists. (That way you can sell your product cheaper.) Provide fans benefits (like concert discounts) for those who purchase the albums.
Rather than bank on one artist to sell millions of albums, make more artists available to us by releasing their records on smaller scales. Let supply and demand, not lobbyists, decide what gets played on the radio.
If you don't make a product we want to buy, we aren't going to pay for it.
Write to Mouse at bbmcshane@bsu.edu
Visit www.classicalgeektheatre.com
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