Music “Theft”

More from the definers of theft….

The RIAA says that transferring a CD to your iPod is unauthorized. This echos a prior statement by a Sony exec (referred in the article) who says making a copy for yourself “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy”.

This shows just how crazy the RIAA really is under the hood. Personal copies of content are always authorized by a concept called Fair Use. Apparently the concepts of intellectual property only apply when they can make money off of it.

The monopoly-holders of content would love to leverage that monopoly to all sorts of insane models. The concept of someone using an iPod, or a personal mix CD, or any device that they can’t control makes them absolutely crazy. They just tend to be much quieter about it now that everyone has iPods.

In short, in secret they see “Fair Use” as a threat to their monopoly and thus, the profits. They’d love to end fair use if they could. Every time a fair use enabling technology comes along they try to sue it out of existence. They tried to stop home VCRs, and they tried to stop the creation of mp3 players.

Don’t get me wrong, I think a temporary monopoly is fine for intellectual property. Temporary monopolies encourage innovation and creation.

But as I’ve mentioned in the past, the content holders (now largely corporations who don’t have a defined lifespan) have successfully lobbied to get that temporary monopoly extended to well over a century. Ongoing monopolies (like the ones that exist now in movies and music) stifle creativity and encourage the status quo.

What would the world be like if the VCR and MP3 player had been stopped by lawsuit? Would that be innovative? Yet the people defining the morality of intellectual property would have done just that.

The next time someone is compelled to say something along the lines of “downloading music is the same as walking into a CD store and stealing it”, they need to think thoroughly on the source of such morality. Stealing a CD is depriving the owner of the possession of the CD. Selling an mp3 illegally is depriving the owner of income (stealing). Downloading or sharing an illegal song (for free) is a violation of copyright.

Both stealing and copyright violation are clearly wrong, but the problem is that content-holders have abused the concept of copyright for so long that it’s blurring the lines over what wrong is.

Did you know that you were violating copyright by using an iPod with music ripped from your CD? If you buy into their morality, you’re buying into much more than you think.