BusinessWeek Takes On the RIAA

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "BusinessWeek magazine has gone medieval on the RIAA, recounting in grisly detail the cruel ordeal to which the RIAA has subjected a completely innocent defendant, Tanya Andersen of Oregon. Nobody can read the story and come to any other conclusion than that the RIAA and its lawyers are total jerks. Of course we've been reading about Atlantic v. Andersen on p2pnet.net and on my blog, and discussing it here, but there's something extra special about a mainstream publication like Business Week really letting them have it."

Comments

Re:You mean besides pension plans?

[cpt kangarooski]

Oh yes - creative artists don't get [pensions]...

That depends on their arrangements with their employer, if they have one. No one is preventing it, but I'd agree that it is not common practice, when possible.

Still, a copyright is not a substitute for a pension. Only a small minority of copyrights have any economic value whatsoever, and of those, the vast, vast majority have most of their value only for a brief time after publication in a given medium. The length depends on the type of work; a daily newspaper has a window of a few hours, a movie in the theaters has a few weeks, a novel has perhaps a year.

Only the tiniest, tiniest number of works have long-lasting economic value. The odds of creating one are on par with winning the lottery. I don't think that anyone would ever suggest that people should play the lottery, rather than invest wisely, or getting a pension, etc.

If an artist is concerned about providing for himself in his old age, or for his family, he should consider whether or not he ought to stay an artist at all; if he can't make money, he really ought to consider a different career. If he does make money, he ought to make careful investments, rather than spend it all, expecting a permanent windfall. He ought to support social welfare programs, as a safety net in case he does run into big financial problems.

An artist who expects to get paid decades later may often find himself disappointed, simply because the audience isn't there. A pension should be more reliable than that.

So if you're going to promote copyrights as a boon for artists, please be realistic about it.