Here in the United States, file sharers have battled record companies and the Recording Industry Association of America, constantly switching from Napster to Audiogalaxy to Kazaa and back again to download music from the Internet.
After the RIAA's ludicrous, point-making lawsuits in 2003 and the continued shutting-down of peer-to-peer sites, we might as well give up and move. To Canada.
Especially after Justice Konrad von Finckenstein's March 31 ruling, in which he overturned a lawsuit by the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA). The CRIA wanted to prosecute 29 individuals who were sharing their large, yet personal, collections of digital files through peer-to-peer services like Kazaa.
But according to Stereophile.com, von Finckenstein wrote that the CRIA didn't prove "high-volume uploaders had distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings." He wrote that they merely had the files on their computer in a folder that other downloaders could access. No crime there.
He compared services like Kazaa and other peer-to-peer sites to the copy machines in any library, which he described as "full of copyrighted material."
It makes sense. If we can walk away from a library, having photocopied Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" in its entirety, we might as well be able to stay home to download Lou Reed's "Transformer."
No one is selling anything, unless it's compilation discs for their friends. Sure, there are those who abuse the peer-to-peer services. But try to find an aspect of society that's free from corruption. For every pirate with 50,000 songs on his hard drive, there's a shark who burns DVDs he checked out from his local library. Besides, no one is making a profit from having a large digital music collection on his Dell.
And no one is losing a profit, especially major record companies. A report recently appeared on CNET.com that was conducted by Felix Oberholzer at Harvard University and Koleman Strumpf at the University of North Carolina. According to Stereophile.com, after a 17-week study, the two researchers found that the effects file sharing has on album sales are "statistically indistinguishable from zero."
Of course, the RIAA responded through the mouth of spokesperson Amy Weiss, who said, "Our own surveys show that those who are downloading more are buying less." What a surprise. The RIAA might have found that, but it's hard to acknowledge the word of an organization that sued a 12-year-old girl in the fall of 2003. (The girl did download 1,000 songs, but most of them were television show themes and children's nursery rhymes. She was obviously crippling national record sales.)
But as RIAA president Cary Sherman said, the lawsuits were used to protect the rights of copyright owners and to encourage fans to turn to legitimate services like Apple's iTunes and Napster 2.0 (because they need the money).
Still, file sharing could be called copyright infringement and downloaders could be circumventing the law. But it's an unparalleled tool for musicians who need the publicity; most downloaders do so to discover new artists. Downloading "Toxic" won't hurt Britney Spears. Turn the channel to VH1. She's doing fine.
HOwever, file sharing can help if a user ends up discovering his new favorite band. It could be the RIAA's cheapest distribution tool. It's too bad the association doesn't get it.
All of a sudden, Canada seems appealing. What's the exchange rate?
Write to Allyn at aswest@bsu.edu
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