Re: In a quandry

[Wes Morgan <wesm at libretech_org>]

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On Monday 21 July 2003 6:44 am, John Davis wrote:

<snip>

>
> Righteous Babe is a member of the RIAA? My opinion of Ani just dropped a
> notch.

</snip>

Well, I have an extremely high opinion of Ani, so my theory is that there is 
some advantage to joining the RIAA even for a label like RB that I'm not 
aware of. I have asked a few musicians w/ their own labels about this, but 
they weren't really sure what it could be (maybe if they were, they'd join 
too). It may have just been a "pick your battles" kind of thing for Ani. But 
yeah, it is disappointing, she always seemed fairly opposed to the corporate 
music regime. Who knows...

<snip>

> The negative effect of the RIAA's decision to treat all customers as
> criminals is that the ones who are already "sharing" mp3s don't give a
> damn if they're considered criminals, but all the legitimate customers
> still buying music will eventually get fed up and quit buying music.
>
> - John

</snip>

I would have to disagree a little here. Many (if not most) of the people 
sharing (no quotes) mp3s do not consider themselves criminals and resent 
being told that they are criminals. But they're stealing, according to the 
law, you might say. Well, yes, according to judicial law, they are. But I 
would argue they are not stealing according to natural law. The restrictions 
placed on music and other copyrightable works such as that are unnatural, and 
they only seemed to work when we didn't have a resource like the Internet 
available to us. (The whole "Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to 
make water not wet" idea)
So, as I see it, these people are just sharing their music with others, not 
necessarily because they're too cheap to buy it, but for many good reasons 
too. If the RIAA et al would pull their collective heads out of the sand and 
start adding value to purchased music rather than suing everyone for sharing 
music, they might notice the increased exposure drives their sales up (not 
that I want to see their profits go up...)
Sharing art is not a bad thing. And I believe we could have a system in place 
that respected people's ability to do this and still provided compensation 
for the artist (not the corporate middle-man).
<blatant-plug>
If this sort of thing really interests you (as it does me), you might be 
interested in my new website, Libretech.org (http://www.libretech.org), which 
is an online community set up to discuss these issues for all forms of art 
and information that can be digitized and thus shared (software, music, film, 
print, etc.)
</blatant-plug>

Wes Morgan

- -- 
"We need to consider the reality of what God wants and how broken the world 
is, and the gap between them, and let a healthy discontent take over our 
souls so that we say, by God's grace and power, I will not quit because it 
matters. It matters." - Roberta Hestenes
- ----------------------------------
Libretech.org - Technology Is Free (http://www.libretech.org)
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