You misunderstand. RIAA doesn't need to make copying impossible--they just need to raise sufficient barriers so that an equal-copy version is harder to get than walking to the store and buying one.
They can make it hard to crack their protected song (maybe it will require special hardware), but when one will do it, all other will have cracked version too. Channels of distribution are already set upped and are pretty effective (Gnutela etc.) Look at software protection business, they haven't yet created program that wasn't cracked and redistributed given that it is interested for enough users and not extremely cheap. And programs are much easier to protect then music.
Or they need somehow prohibit playing any "unprotected" file format including legacy formats like mp3 and wav by any program on user's computer - seems too unrealistic for me.
> This situation is NO different than the battle against proprietary software. Instead of trying to get RIAA music for free, we need to promote all new music.
You can take any software product and create your own version of it whether you make it open source or proprietary. With music AFAIK legal you can't take the song you like, restore its score and lyrics, and record your own version of it, at least not for sailing it.
If software were like music it would be illegal to create another WYSIWYG HTML editor, for example.:)
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You misunderstand. RIAA doesn't need to make copying impossible--they just need to raise sufficient barriers so that an equal-copy version is harder to get than walking to the store and buying one.
They can make it hard to crack their protected song (maybe it will require special hardware), but when one will do it, all other will have cracked version too. Channels of distribution are already set upped and are pretty effective (Gnutela etc.)
Look at software protection business, they haven't yet created program that wasn't cracked and redistributed given that it is interested for enough users and not extremely cheap. And programs are much easier to protect then music.
Or they need somehow prohibit playing any "unprotected" file format including legacy formats like mp3 and wav by any program on user's computer - seems too unrealistic for me.
> This situation is NO different than the battle against proprietary software. Instead of trying to get RIAA music for free, we need to promote all new music.
:)
You can take any software product and create your own version of it whether you make it open source or proprietary. With music AFAIK legal you can't take the song you like, restore its score and lyrics, and record your own version of it, at least not for sailing it.
If software were like music it would be illegal to create another WYSIWYG HTML editor, for example.