First off, I take back everything good that I’ve ever said about News.Com’s balanced presentation of issues. I realize that their ‘News.Context’ column is an opinion piece. It’s not an attempt at objectivity. But for crying out loud, asking RIAA President Cary Sherman to comment on copyright law? That’s like asking the mob to comment on fair lending laws.
Still, Sherman’s Honest talk about downloads piece does raise solid points about the flawed logic of many file sharing advocates. Along the way he puts on his spiffy little martyr costume, and trots out tired arguments blaming industry downturns on file sharing, rather than the increasingly pop-single-oriented industry machine. He also ignores the fact that more and more mid-to-low-tier artists – the ones who aren’t Metallica or Britney Spears – are expressing profound dissatisfaction with the treatment they receive by labels.
In addition, behavior by the labels in the past indicates that they’re less concerned about the spirit of the law (protecting the rights of content creators to profit from their work while encouraging broad dissemination of as much content as possible). Witness the successful slam-dunking of Napster, followed by an RIAA-member-label’s immediate attempts to steal rights from artists for a similar corporate-sponsored service.
Think about it for a second. They shut down Napster to protect artists. Then they tried to copy and distribute, without permission, the works of thousands of artists they had previously worked with. They also tried to change copyright laws to make this legal.
More and more, it sounds like the RIAA’s complaint is that *they* want to steal from artists, and don’t like it when someone else muscles in on their action.
Sigh.
Come on, people. Let’s focus. The serious threats to copyright law are NOT RIAA lawsuits against file sharing networks. They’re the attempts to purchase new laws from Congress! Witness the 1998 Copyright Extension act, the DCMA, the absurd changes to webcasting fees, and recent attempts to legalize *malicious hacking by RIAA employees* if someone is *suspected* of posessing illegaly copied files.
Downloading a Tool song isn’t striking a blow against the man. It’s only giving the RIAA more ammunition for the next time they trot over to Congress with some crackhead idea to ‘preserve the rights of artists.’
That is all. Thank you.