Do you know what the RIAA is? It is the Record Industry Association of America, a trade group that represents almost everyone in the Recording Industry. They are also the biggest opponents of music piracy, file sharing and it appears now, even making digital copies of your own music. In a few recent articles, the RIAA has said that it is illegal for consumers to put digital copies (MP3's) of legal CD's that they own on to their computers. While I am slow to take the side of people who are blatantly stealing music, i.e. file sharing, getting digital copies or burned CD's from friends, or ripping CD's from the library, this isn't what I am talking about. I just read in the Star Tribune this weekend about the slumping CD sales. Doesn't the RIAA get it that the business that they are in is in trouble? It seems they want to make criminals of people like me who are working hard to keep only music that they own on their iPods. I think that the RIAA should pull it's head out from where the sun doesn't shine and worry about trying to give people good music in a convenient and fair legal way. And that's my two cents. Read more here and here.
3 comments:
Doesn't the RIAA get it that the business that they are in is in trouble? It seems they want to make criminals of people like me who are working hard to keep only music that they own on their iPods. I think that the RIAA should pull it's head out from where the sun doesn't shine and worry about trying to give people good music in a convenient and fair legal way.
They know exactly what they're doing. They are hinging their future success on changing the public's perception of what is legal and what is not. By altering the understanding of fair use, they hope to eventually win over the courts and have the provision banned by the court system.
Believe me, they couldn't care less if CD sales are slumping. They are using that statistic only as fodder to flood the media with their disinformation scam.
They want to do away with CD sales all together. They realize that the real money maker is in online distribution and it's to their advantage to have it that way. They don't have to pay as much (the online retailers are handling the bandwidth costs, etc), they get instantaneous sales stats, and they still have control over what's distributed. They also know that digital media is more easily destroyed than physical media. When a careless music lover loses the digital format, there may not be a CD backup somewhere forcing that user to repurchase the music from the RIAA again.
It's a mess and it's difficult for those that aren't "hooked in" to the RIAA disinformation message for the last 8 years to understand what's going on now that they are really starting to ramp things up.
Great comment Bill. That is exactly why I like to have the hard copy in my hand. Let's boycott the RIAA all together!
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