Music makes the people come together My sister came to visit me the other day. She's my best friend, but I hadn't seen her in a while. So as we were catching up, for some reason I began to tell her about my disillusionment with the recording industry. I told her how the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group that represents the recording industry in the United States, just filed a lawsuit against 36 University of South Carolina students for allegedly "pirating" music. How did the RIAA select these 36, when it claims more than half of all college students download music without payingfor it? Why not just sue all college students? I asked her. Silence. I also told her how the RIAA sued Jammie Thomas, a 30-year-old single mom of two for sharing 24 songs with peers using Kazaa, a popular piece of peer-to-peer file sharing software. The RIAA won the suit, and it looks like Ms. Thomas will have to pay a ridiculous $220,000 in restitution to the multi-billion dollar industry - just for sharing two albums worth of songs. As I was telling my sister this, she just stood silently listening to my ranting. I asked her what she thought of it all. She just shrugged her shoulders and walked away. Sadly that's what many people do when they hear about the excessive litigation of the recording industry. When they learn that college students and single mothers are being sued by the recording industry for copyright infringement, they just say "Oh, that's messed up" or shrug their shoulders and walk away, never realizing that the recording industry just took away another piece of their freedom - their freedom to choose. The tragic part of it all is that the RIAA has been slowly eating at our freedom of choice for years. In the early years of recorded music, when it was confined to vinyl,the music industry was safe from so-called pirates, as it wasn't very cost effective for people to bootleg records. Then in the 1980s, the power unwittingly ended up in the hands of the people with the advent of the dual-deck cassette recorder. People used this new technology to make "dubbed" copies of the tapes they purchased. They would also record songs off of the radio and make mix tapes to share with friends. With such slogans as "Home Taping is Killing Music," the music industry saw this invention as a threat to its hegemony and launched a very unpopular campaign against dubbing. A decade later, the music industry was at it again when it famously sued p2p software pioneer Napster for copyright infringement. The RIAA won its case in part because Napster's file-sharing model wasn't fully p2p, it relied on a system of centralized, Napster-owned file servers. Instead of deterring people from illegal downloads, many people signed up for Napster due to all the media attention the case received. These people were introduced for the first time to a whole new world of music - music they had never heard before ... beautiful music. With Napster's demise, people embraced other p2p software such as Kazaa,Morpheus and BitTorrrent. Using the Gnutella file-sharing network, Kazaa and Morpheus are truly p2p in that with the software, one person can give another person files off of his computer. BitTorrent technology is a decentralized distributed p2p system in which many people contribute portions of data to create a complete file. When the music industry saw that they couldn't stop people from sharing mp3s, they began copy protecting compact discs, so that people could not rip cd audio tracks. Though people eventually found work-arounds, this was a disaster with even musicians like Switchfoot boycotting the technology by teaching their fans how to rip the audio tracks off of their cds. British band Radiohead is a great example of the power of file-sharing. Their experimental 2000 release Kid A made it to number one on the Billboard 200 chart in its first week of release because it was leaked on Napster. Because the music industry tries to prohibit file-sharing, people are not being exposed to new artists, and the record companies are losing money. They try to blame file sharing, for a decline in cd sales without taking into account the sales of digital-only music. At the same time they put millions of promotional dollars behind pop-fodder bands while neglecting real musicians and musicianship. The only real loser in this situation is the fledgling artist loses who gets dropped by his big label for lack of sales. And that's the rub. Despite the fact that file-sharing has decidedly added money to the music industry's coffers through free exposure and promotion the RIAA still tries to kill file sharing. The success of bands like Radiohead, who don't have lots of promotion shows that record labels and the consumer can reach common ground. Record labels would still get paid handsomely if they weren't so greedy. Most people are willing to pay to download music for their personal consumption. More often than not the consumer just wants to try the product in a high-quality format before he buys it. From Robin Hood to the Pirate Bay, when people find a way to share good things with others, someone comes along and beats them down for doing so...that's how it has been since the beginning of time. And that's probably how it will always be -- This constant back and forth. I really shouldn't be shocked by the actions of the music industry, but I can't shake my feeling of disgust. If the music industry's actions were really about copyright infringement, maybe the idealist in me would be quiet. But since I know the whole fight is really about money, I feel cheated, used, and abused. Music is as natural as breathing. It's in our souls. It's in our spirits. That's why we sing in the rain and dance in the street on sunny days. And if Kabuki rockers Kiss are right, "God gave rock and roll" to us, so why are we letting the music industry regulate our music? POSTED BY tifforr@gmail.com (Tiffany) AT 3/23/2008 6:45 AM 0 COMMENTS » POST A COMMENT  |  DIGG IT « BACK HOME ABOUT ME Welcome to the Tiff Spot, where we take a look at what's going on in the news ... just in case you missed it. This is as much my forum as it is your forum, so feel free to say whatever you want. If you need something, e-mail me. tifforr@gmail.com RECENT POSTS Looking for love in all the wrong places? Stop it already . 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