RIAA Says P2P Encourages Illegal Downloads

stlhawkeye writes "The RIAA is at it again, attacking inconvenient technology because it can be abused. They have sent another round of letters to P2P services, asking them to stop "encouraging users" to illegally distribute copyrighted material. eDonkey, LimeWire, and Kazaa are all on the RIAA's hit list, along with 2Hub, BitTorrent, WinMX and Free Peers, maker of file-swapping software BearShare. One wonders how they intend to attack BitTorrent, which can be and is used in legitimate mass distribution efforts of legal material, such as World of Warcraft patches. Are FTP and /usr/sbin/scp next?"

Comments

In other news

[dgatwood]

Apache can be used to serve illegal downloads. Film at 11!

Living the lie

[theonetruekeebler]

Apple also puts stickers on all iPods asking you not to pirate music.

All the sex shops here have racks and racks of exotic toys, all labeled "for novelty purposes only," because in Atlanta it's illegal to sell a dildo.

And all the head shops all sell "water pipes."

In either place, if you start asking questions about getting high or getting off, you get kicked out.

Interestingly enough, you can walk right into a gun shop and say "I need a gun to kill my husband with" and they'll still sell it to you (maybe). Okay, you have to go outside the city limits for that. I love that you have to go outside the city limits to buy a dildo or a gun, and I've seen more than one bumper sticker that says "when dildos are outlawed, only outlaws will have dildos."

Maybe if they called a gun a "hole punch" the way they call a bong a "water pipe" we could skirt this whole issue. I mean, we call it "the Internet" instead of "all the music and porno in the world for free," right?

The business model

[Infonaut]

if the business model was every actually looked at instead of just blindly protected.

I am also surprised that nobody pays more attention to this. There's an elephant in the room, and nobody wants to believe it exists. Musicians are just as much a part of the problem as the RIAA. Why? Because musicians buy into the notion that they should sign with a label, have the label pay for everything, and receive whatever the label feels fit to give them in return.

Essentially everyone (musicians, labels, consumers) has bought into the notion that the huge crapshoot that the music industry has established, wherein a small minority of music gets major backing and the rest is given limited exposure at best, is a rational marketplace. If musicians in aggregate were less interested in becoming big stars, and more interested in making music and being justly compensated for it, the labels would lose all leverage over artists. For every Madonna there are 99 acts that got signed and never made any real money, because the labels were running a company store setup. The message has been put out by Courtney Love, Janis Ian, et. al. for years now. You have to be blind and deaf not to know that this is the system.

There is no longer any need for the enormous middleman structure that sustains the music industry. Hardly anyone is satisfied with the music being generated by the big labels. There are plenty of musicians who are content to play music and have more control over how their music is distributed. When the majority of musicians accept that a business model built on bloated middlemen is not in their best interests, the rest of us will benefit as well.