Fight against the RIAA

From AJS.COM

There is an ongoing struggle between the RIAA (a consortium of music publishers) and their customers (you and I, even if you didn't realize you were part of the struggle) to determine the future of music publishing and purchasing. The problem is that it has become trivial to share music, and it is a natural inclination to do so. It also threatens the very idea of commercial music distribution, or might seem to....

1 History of the conflict
2 Digital age
3 Conclusions
4 Failure to understand the impact
5 News

History of the conflict

With every wave of new technology, the fight changes shape slightly, and one of the biggest fights to date was over the compact audio cassette, which worried the industry because they felt that it would render duplication of music trivial, and harm sales. As it turns out, the introduction of this technology was the beginning of one of the largest booms that the industry has seen.

Digital age

Now, the debate surrounds digital duplication, or "ripping" of CDs. This allows individuals to own huge libraries of perfectly duplicated music, and the RIAA's concern is on several fronts:

Piracy

The most often cited concern, and the RIAA's public face on the debate, is piracy. However, even this word encompasses more than one activity. Piracy can include:

Large-scale commercial duplication. This often involves direct, physical mass-duplication of media, and varies little from the duplication of analog forms such as tape.
Personal ripping. This may be done for archival purposes or to listen to the music in a digital player such as a desktop audio player or a hand-held system such as an iPod. The industry often suggests that such measures should be considered exceptions, and allowed, but commercial copy protection makes no such distinction.
File sharing. This is a very difficult phenomenon to quantify, since file sharing takes so many forms and can so easily scale to include hundreds, thousands or even millions of users. In its simplest form, file sharing would include the popular creation of "mix CDs" which are given to friends. In the form that the industry claims is most harmful, this includes peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing among arbitrarily large numbers of users over the Internet.

Distribution control

The RIAA and the industry don't speak publicly very often about distribution control, but it is a major factor, and often the unspoken answer to the question, "if profits are soaring, what's the problem?"

The problem is that file sharing and casual CD duplication actually have more impact on the industry's ability to control distribution than professional CD pirating. This is because of the social element involved. Why would social sharing of music hurt the industry? Well, it doesn't, but it hurts existing, large media conglomerates by making it more trivial for otherwise unadvertised artists to gain regional, national or even international recognition. It also allows artists to self-publish, an outcome which would devastate the recording industry (while it would help artists).

Branding

The other problem with digital distribution by artists, publishers or file-sharers is that it removes much of the branding of the product. When a person downloads a song from a file-sharing service, it is not usually associated with a publisher, only a band. This means that brand name recognition for music publication is eroding, and studios will have to compete with new market entrants who do not have the same recognition.

Conclusions

The RIAA is ultimately aware that they will lose this battle. The more they abuse their customers, the more not being a member of the RIAA becomes a selling point for independent music labels who will one day enter the mainstream. What's more, the technology continues to evolve, and music continues to sell regardless of the average consumer's access to professional-grade ripping software, high-speed Internet and file-sharing tools.

None of that, however, will prevent the RIAA (and their cousin in the film industry, the MPAA) from causing tremendous harm to consumers individually and collectively before they finally admit defeat. Laws such as the DMCA harm the Constitutional protections that copyright provides to consumers as well as producers of copyrighted content, but at the same time erode the power of producers in favor of their distributors. None of this consumer/producer-bondage was envisioned by the framers of the Constitution, and the argument that the protection needs of industry change in the face of modern technology is growing thinner every day as the comparisons to cassette tapes and Betamax become more and more apt.

The fight is about control and soaring corporate profits, not artists, consumers or just compensation for creative work. The fight needs to end. Go enjoy some music and if you find you enjoy the creative spirit behind it, send your Representative and Senator a note, asking that they stop listening to the RIAA's lobbyists and start listening to their constituents.

Failure to understand the impact

The impact of music distribution through unpaid channels has often been mischaracterized by all sides of the discussion. Downloaders insist that they improve the visibility of music, and are thus a benefit. The music industry, in turn, claims every downloaded song as a "lost sale" (as if little Timmy could have purchased the 9,000 songs that he just downloaded on his summer allowance). The reality is that music sales have ebbed and flowed over the past 10 years, but at the very least the music industry is fostering a very confrontational relationship with its younger customers who demand ready access to the music they love in ways that allow them to mix-and-match where and when they listen to it and on what devices. It's not a difficult desire to understand, but for the reasons listed above it's absolutely a non-starter for the industry.

News

OK, now you know the shape of the discussion, so you're ready to start following what's going on. Here's some popular news sources, covering the battle: