Posts Tagged ‘piracy’

RIAA Wants Us to Pay Twice for Our Music

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