RIAA wins in court!

The RIAA won their first federal case pertaining to the protection of copyrighted music and file sharing this week. I was expecting a much more intellectual exchange of thoughts about this. I haven't seen much thus far. The offender was fined over $220K for 24 songs worth less than $25.00. This was just a cut and dried case about a high tech shop-lifter who will have to pay more than she should for her crimes. I wonder if that's the precedence setter? At any rate, just for the record, I would like to see the music industry change soon. I have always been a consumer, my wife and I own over 800 CD's which we have purchased over the years. For us it's more about convienience. I need a service to convert all of these compact-discs, along with their liner notes to a digital format to make listening to them more enjoyable in today's world of technology. I don't have the time to do that. Not to mention the fact that the industry will not replace what you have purchased if it is damaged. Maybe the recording industry should include a little customer service in their price of a compact disc and it may entise more people to stay on thier side. Say, replace lost, damaged or stolen copies, with proof-of-purchase of course. Or, allow registered purchasers to download or stream, at any time from any location the music they have legally purchased. Just a thought...

Radiohead - In Rainbows: An approach that could change it all?

Speaking of the RIAA and copyrights, Radiohead announced the release of their 7th album recently. The story here isn't the announcement, although fans like me are very excited, but the release approach. They intend to make it available for download and allow the "consumer" to set the price. In my opinion, this is the way any work of art should be delivered. This isn't the first bold move in the music industry, if you look around you'll see examples of other artists opening their vision. One of the most notable "vision changes" was highlighted in David Bowie's interview with the New York times where he stated "The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.". So, if we do the math on this theory, the music recording/distribution industry will be non-existent by the end of 2012. I think it will change sooner than that.

RIAA in Court Today

The RIAA get it's first trip to the dance today since starting it's campaign to rid the world of the distribution of copyrighted material through technologies such as Peer-to-Peer. A trial is one thing that has not yet happened during the RIAA's 4+ year litigation campaign. Until today... The outcome should be very interesting.