Friday, August 22, 2008

Have copyright owners gone mad?

I was just reading this article on The Industry Standard, Is the RIAA targeting the Electronic Arts-owned Sims karaoke site?, and thought to myself: "Have the content owners gone completely mad? Are they actually trying to destroy our love of music?"

-R.B.


Keywords: digital copyright law online internet law legal download upload peer to peer p2p file sharing filesharing music movies indie independent label freeculture creative commons pop/rock artists riaa independent mp3 cd favorite songs intellectual property portable music player

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nothing could be as worse as their (music industry) going after dentists and doctors for the music being played in their offices, karaoke in bars, websites, what's the difference? The industry is, and has been, out of control for a very long time now. Who will stop them?

RJ

Jadeic said...

We will.

Matt Fitzpatrick said...

Well, it's a nitpick, but this looks more like an ASCAP/BMI thing.

raybeckerman said...

Did I say it was the RIAA? I was just referring to an article. What was I supposed to do, change the title of someone else's article?

It's the substance of the article that is important, not whether the author understood the difference between one bunch of mad dogs or another.

So yes it was a nitpick.

Anonymous said...

Sorry... that would be me. When the news was first breaking, it was unclear what was being pulled, either entire catalogs or simply (as it was later revealed) the video portions. Still stupid either way. But yes, they are killing the industry themselves.

raybeckerman said...

Well, Cyndy, as I said before, "It's the substance of the article that is important, not whether the author understood the difference between one bunch of mad dogs or another."

Crosbie Fitch said...

You should seriously start wondering if copyright itself isn't mad.

It should clearly be insane to grant distribution, performance and reproduction privileges in the same world in which there exists an instantaneous diffusion device (aka The Internet).

Grants of monopoly have long been recognised as unnatural and hence unethical privileges, but that hasn't stopped those who would benefit from them from enacting them (a mere three years after the ink had dried on the US constitution that gave no sanction beyond the securing of author's natural, exclusive right).

When the nature of information and our digital facility with it renders reproduction monopolies unviable, reveals them for the ineffective anachronisms they truly are, then sanity should be credited to those who have divested themselves of copyright.

The future for copyright is abolition, final emancipation for all people from the last vestiges of inegalitarianism.

raybeckerman said...

Dear crosbie,

As someone who has been working in copyright law for 34 years, in my opinion, real copyright law isn't nearly as bad as you think it is.

Always bear in mind that the RIAA's manufactured version isn't really the law.

The real radicals here are the RIAA lawyers, who will say anything if you pay them enough, and who lie every day in court.

I don't know why you want to try to out-radical the radicals.

raybeckerman said...

Dear crosbie, I have rejected your last comment -- and could have rejected your first comment -- on the ground that it is off topic. The subject of the post is abuse of existing copyright law.

If I were one of the PR trolls at the RIAA I would love to have someone like yourself posting comments like that, which deflect attention from the subject at hand, and play the reductio ad absurdum game.

If you're not actually working for the RIAA, and really do believe that all copyright law is bad, then you're in the wrong forum; this blog is about real problems going on in the real world.