Let our own music play

Well they have done it again. The RIAA is trying to crack down on illegal file sharing and trying to control our lives.

I agree with the fact that we need to respect copyrights and that we need give artists their fair share. However, much of the data related to file sharing points to the fact that file sharing actually increases CD sales.

Another fact that everyone neglects to mention is that when the CD sales started to go down was right after the RIAA, Best Buy, and other companies had been found guilty of price fixing and had to pay out quite a hefty fee in the class-action lawsuit.

No, now they are doing something that alienates their audience even more. They are saying that consumers can’t even make copies of their own music. “Ripping” or copying music from a CD into a digital format is considered legal under “fair use” rights. If an individual has a physical copy of a CD, they are able to use it in any format that they chose. (I’m not going into digital versions of this, because they seem to be breaking this in my opinion with DRM usage.) Once in a digital format such as MP3, users can put them in IPods, or other different devices.

Now, in another one of their cases against yet another victim, they are alleging that consumers can’t rip CDs. Part of the argument according to some sources is they are ripping them and putting them in shared folders. I still think that this is a dangerous argument. You put files in a shared folder to use on a home network or if you are traveling and still want to access your files. Also, as other articles have pointed out, we break copyright law everyday by the normal things that we do. We take pictures with advertising in the background, we forward e-mail, etc. Can you imagine what life would be like if we had to be careful of every little thing that did like that? Civilization in America would come to a stop.

Frankly, I think that the RIAA is being very stupid and that they need to just get with the program. They need to make higher quality stuff, and stop making their customers angry and try to get money out of them from suing them. And they need to remember before everyone hates them, that consumers have rights too.

one such article is here.