RIAA Wants Us to Pay Twice for Our Music

      by Wyatt Walter

In the past I’ve not really had an opinion on the RIAA. Their tactics of going after individuals is pretty ridiculous, but pirating software, music, and movies, etc. is still morally and ethically wrong. If someone creates a piece of work, whether software, music, movies, or any other digital art and they want to be compensated for it monetarily, then that’s their deal. If someone wants to release their work under the GPL, BSD, Creative Commons, or any other “free” license, then great. Go ahead and use it. Unfortunately, the RIAA has taken enforcing those rules a bit too far. By definition, the people haven’t even stolen anything causing the RIAA to inevitably fail in the courts. They’ve also gone after individuals in the courts who clearly can’t afford to pay legal fees and lawsuits even if they were successful. Apparently, now the RIAA has realized this failure and is now going after ISPs to try to solve the “problem”.

The RIAA is in the midst of deals with ISPs to filter traffic of individuals. When a consumer is suspected of participating in piracy, they will receive warnings and if the actions are repeated, the ISP will shut off that customer. The software and technology behind detecting these kinds of things has been proven somewhat unreliable but even that is beside the point. If ISPs are forced into adding that kind of technology they won’t be the ones covering the costs. The consumers will be the ones paying for adding additional capacity needed to perform that kind of scanning. ISPs would have to add servers, networking equipment, software, and staff to manage the scanning. It would appear that not only does the RIAA want us to pay for our music as we should, but pay extra so that they can be sure we have actually bought our digital media. All this while P2P and other file sharing services simply move to SSL so that their traffic can’t be scanned.

If paying twice for our media wasn’t enough, the RIAA wants to put the responsibility on the ISPs for stopping piracy. According to the report from torrentfreak referenced earlier:

“…in the absence of proof to the contrary, an Internet service provider shall be considered as knowing that the content it stores is infringing or illegal, and thus subject to liability for copyright infringement…”

Apparently now the ISPs have to be the “piracy police” now. We already have to pay enough for connection to the Internet, and now we have to pay for the ISPs to have lawyers on retainer as well. If I have to pay my ISP to spy on my traffic, I’m not sure how much I’m going to be willing to spend on music anymore. I’m sure there’s a lot of others in the same boat. What was the goal of the RIAA anyway? Oh yeah, ensure there’s a market for musicians to sell their music.. Something that most consider a luxury, especially during hard economic times.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (1) : Dec 21st, 2008

One Response to “RIAA Wants Us to Pay Twice for Our Music”

  1. Dusty Schnabel Says:
    December 22nd, 2008 at 11:16 am

    I agree, intellectual property is just that, property. Thus it should not be stolen or ’shared’ on the internet. I would argue though that the RIAA and MPAA need to re-evaluate their business models. Paying 20-25 dollars for a CD or DVD, is not in line with what the market is willing to pay to some extent. Plus, they have not been overly friendly or open allowing their content onto stores such as iTunes without burdensome DRM.

    Although iTunes has made it fairly easy to work with DRM’ed material on approved software or devices, there is still a lot of lock-in and lack of flexibility in what one can do with material that was paid for by the consumer. This affects people’s acceptance of the technology. This is when some will turn to ripping DRM free content or going to P2P to gain access. If it weren’t for iTunes, I wouldn’t have purchases the amount of media I have in the past 5 years the legitimate way.

    With that being said, I know that if there is an option for getting something for free, there will be people who will use that option. But the amount of hassle it takes to manage DRM some times, I think just pushes legitimate consumers to the ‘Dark Side’ of online media.

    Cheers,
    DJS

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