Here’s an interesting side note from the whole “RIAA Sues The World” saga (surely you heard they sued a 12 year old girl):
“Meanwhile, several internet music services have offered to pay the $2,000 (£1,255) fine paid by the mother of 12-year-old Brianna LaHara to settle the lawsuit the RIAA had filed against the girl.
Grokster president Wayne Rosso, a member of the peer-to-peer services trade group P2P United, said he felt the RIAA were acting like “bullies” by targeting a young girl, which is why it was offering to pay the money. ” (source: BBC)
This whole mess does make for interesting reading in the news. Every day there’s some new blurb someone said that either justifies or condemns the sharing of files, or a new lawsuit served out, protested, or settled. And then there’s that whole amnesty thing. . . please.
It seems to me that the RIAA might be hurting itself more than the people they’re out to get, though. They’re suing these people in hope that they will become their customers again. And man, the analogies are abound on this subject like RIAA subpoenas in courts. The more I read them the more I figure you can make any analogy to suit your purpose. RIAA says “you wouldn’t steal a BMW because you thought the price was too high,” and the file sharers spit back “yeah but you get to test-drive a BMW, and there are cheaper cars on the market.” Both sides make it a question of ethics, right and wrong, wwjd? and that sort of thing. Well, wtfwjd?
I think the bare truth of it is it’s just incredibly easy to get a music file for free off the internet. Why get dressed and go out to hunt up some obscure CD when you can do a quick search for the file in your jammies? Easy easy easy. And cheap, which is always good for the college students. More money for beer. Simple as that man, not a matter of ethics, matter of convenience. Just recently have there been some legitimate music services out there where you can listen to all the music you want. You do pay money, yes, but it’s cheaper than going the CD route. For Mac users, there’s Apple’s I Tunes. Well, that covers about 8% of the computer population. Well done. Right now I’m using a service called Rhapsody. Nine bucks a month or 25 bucks for three, listen to whatever you want (that they have, and might I add that their selection of film scores is lacking), and you can download for under a buck a song. Best that I know of for Windows people right now. However, the free stuff is still out there. Why pay nine bucks a month when you can get it for free? Where does it all end? (Stop the internet please, I’d like to get off. . .)
The internet has instituted a whole new way of doing things, and there is no precedent. It’s changing the way we exchange information (for the better, I think), and we will have to change some ourselves to keep up. Copyright laws included in that statement. Now it’s not only information we’re exchanging now, its things like movies, music, computer programs, and pictures. In other words, intellectual property, which can be very vague in definition anyway. How in the world can you control use of this intellectual property when it’s so easy to copy and distribute among the masses? There is no clear answer as of yet, but one surefire way of not doing things is to go around like Big Brother, watching every move you do, waiting for you to do something ‘against the rules.’ Read 1984. It’s just not right.
Not only can you partake of other people’s intellectual property, now you can just as easily create your own. With the internet, anybody, and boy do I mean anybody, can write songs, create art, write fiction, nonfiction, poetry, journals, whatever man, and publish it in the internet. It’s cheap, instantaneous, and anybody can do it. It rules out the middle man entirely. No publishers, managers, distributors, or (unfortunately) proofreaders. The creator of all this stuff becomes all of these things, and therefore, they get more control. Granted, there is a lot of absolute shit on the internet, and something like over half of it is porn, but those few shining stars do make their way out of the sludge. Weird crazy stuff that you’d never see in mainstream. There’s the hilarious All Your Base Are Belong To Us video thing, and explodingdog.com, to name a few popular things in the internet culture. I doubt this stuff could have come to the forefront of our culture through the snail-media (smedia, hahaha).
What it comes down to, is no middle man equals no RIAA and similar organizations, and I believe they know it. I think this lawsuit crackdown is done out of desperation and fear, and possibly a little loathing. A how-come-they-didnt-see-this-coming sort of thing. I don’t think anybody did. The internet was originally just a group of researcher’s computers, networked so they could more easily exchange stale, academia-style information. And now, just look what has happened. In just a short amount of time, too. I don’t believe it’s the end of the world as we know it, like the RIAA would have us to believe. They thought similar things with the advent of recordable cassette tapes. This little snag will work itself out in the next three years, and some new revolutionary event will explode again. Who knows what would happen next? I can’t even begin to imagine.