[1432] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: Globe: BC, MIT decline to name students in music-use case
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kat Allen)
Wed Jul 23 10:18:48 2003
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 09:27:46 -0400
From: Kat Allen <katallen@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <003601c350ba$e0c6f420$0200a8c0@mit.edu>
> I wonder if the RIAA would be so eager to pursue these Stalinistic
> tactics of persuasion if the ramifications involved a widespread
> boycott
> by members of their target audience (college and high school students)
> of CDs and other products? Furthermore, I wonder if an alliance could
> be made between groups and if a peaceful compromise could be made and
> accepted. Perhaps establish an organization by students which is
> pro-copyright honoring, however, will work with organizations to find
> alternative forms of compensation off of this already established
> market?
>
> I don't know... it just upsets me to see all this happening, there
> must
> be a better way than pillaging from college students in this battle.
>
> Ps - Who is responsible for the horrid Digital Millennium Copyright
> Act?
To start from the end, the RIAA lobbyists and Your Excellent
CongressCritters are responsible for the DMCA. It's to protect you,
see -- the American recording industry could not exist without a
monopoly over the distribution methods of other people's work, and the
right to not only form contracts which amount to indentured servitude
for artists, but also to viciously control the distribution and
exposure of the "their" music.
<!-- end very bitter rant -->
Working backwards, there is already an organization trying to honor
copyright while allowing music to be downloaded from the web on a
song-by-song basis: Apple Computer. Their iTunes Music Store, while
not available to Windows or Un*x users as yet, allows you to download
just the song you want, or whole albums, and to move them between your
own computers or burn them to mix CDs. If this sort of system is
successful (and thus far, according to Apple's numbers, it has been),
it should show the record industry that the web *does* have a valid
distribution method by which they can get paid for music which is
easily available to consumers. Since the music comes from a "trusted"
source (in that you always get the song you think you're getting --
something no free distribution system can claim) it appears that many
consumers will choose to pay a nominal fee, rather than spend hours
looking for the song on a free network and sorting through badly
labeled or mislabeled files.
Right now, however, the RIAA isn't buying into this system -- they
don't trust that consumers will choose their time over their money --
and so thinks that the right way to deter this sort of theft is to
apply a hefty monetary penalty. The RIAA is making its priorities
clear, certainly -- what matters to them is not intellectual property,
or consumer loyalty, or even the music -- all they care about is the
dollar value. Given that, there is very little hope that they will
respond to boycotts (they haven't responded in the past, even when
response has been moderately high, and organizational challenges have
been overwhelming to most boycotts), to threats, or to accusations that
they lack compassion in going after poor college students. I applaud
MIT and other large organizations for blocking access to their network
records -- it is a step in the right direction towards reasonable
privacy practices -- but I don't see that it will stop the RIAA's
campaign to terrorize the users of music-sharing services.
-Kat
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------
Katherine H. Allen (Kat) katallen@mit.edu
**My opinions are my own, and not those of any organization or group
with which I may be associated.**
Notary Public for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
My commission expires 10/17/2008 notarypublic@mit.edu
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