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Even in South Australia I am sure somebody would have noticed a large chunk of the worlds fission bombs going off. That said, Disaster Area are touring again so something is bound to go off.

If you create music ...

Ooops, you just disqualified 99% of slashdot participants — thus underscoring my point.

you should never let ownership of your songs fall into the hands of these vultures, lest they use it to sue children.

Now let me demolish your point... Some real musicians, such as Metallica and U2 think, "the vultures" aren't aggressive enough.

As for your "sue children" — please, stop the demagoguery. If the same cheeky child was throwing a rock through your window every morning, you'd be suing him and his parents within a week — there are plenty of misdeeds, for which young age is no excuse.

All that said, you are welcome to give your own music away on whatever terms you wish. Just don't prevent others from enforcing their rights to control their creations...

I think the RIAA and distributors have approached the problem all wrong, and let me run this by people for their thoughts.

All recorded music should be free of copyright and freely available and copyable. Recorded music is not unlike a GMC truck commercial. The objective is to draw people's interest into the product, which in the case of music is the performance, which is today definitely profitable. The actual song composition, words etc are clearly restricted, but the recording itself is an advertisement for the musician/composer. The sale of CDs should continue, but the content on those CDs should be free of any DRM or restrictions of use.

Simply put, a band is only as good as their performance. It is true there are musicians who stick to the studio only and potentially some forms of music that just don't play well to an audience (although, I would love to see some of Eno's early work live in a dark room etc), however if musicians were paid for their performance instead of their skill with a recording device, bands like Nightranger would never had made a penny (they sucked, btw in concert the times I saw them, YMMV).

I recently read an interesting speech my cousin sent to me yesterday by Paul McGuinness.

http://www.u2.com/news/index.php?mode=full&news_id=2196

It's this kind of thinking you are facing from the RIAA. We are the criminals and there is no compromise.

You know your format is doomed if you consider a 15 year old your "expert" to quote.

15-year-old David MacRunnel, who owns more than 1,000 records

Actually, Great Britain and Ireland produce far superior music. Movies and software? Well, considering that the majority of software development is now offshored and Hollywood is resorting to remakes of old TV shows and films to make a quick buck, I'd argue against that as well.

Unless, of course, you get publicity. Bono was just nominated for his Second Nobel Peace Prize

Yeah, but without it, what would we have called my sister's favorite band?

On further roaming the U2 site I found this -

http://www.u2.com/homepage/news110601_detail.html where you get free music from those fine irish chaps!

Get some artist to produce an album and then market it and distribute it entirely over the Internet.

U2 are a pretty cool band for this kind of thing - Bonos into redistribution of wealth - he's rich as fuck - and he's said plenty of times that he's cool with people bootlegging U2 gigs.

Everyone email them from their site suggesting they do a charity gig for amnesty or greenpeace or netaid or Drop The Debt, and then sell an MP3 album of the gig from their site for $3, or a physical CD for $10. Get them to send the sales info to the chart compilers world wide and see if they can chart with it. Allow Amazon, and the other online music retailers to sell it - but do not licence it for sale on the streets. And limit the money Amazon can make by only allowing a 10% mark up on cost price 'to ensure the money goes to a good cause'.

This could be bonos live aid - let him look Bob Geldolf in the face without thinking 'flash bastard'. And we get a proof of principle that people want to buy music cheaper, and more directly.