From the Washington Post :
In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.
The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.
Baffling. This strategy was out of date when I was in middle school ten years ago -- hell, individuals making copies of copyrighted material like this has existed since effing cassette tapes.
I pay for all my music nowadays, but I'm definitely not above burning mix CDs for friends -- and I'm more scrupulous than most of the listeners I know. As if going after individual downloaders as a deterrent wasn't already an exercise in futility -- there's no way in hell this can possibly work. An attempt to restrict uploading onto personal computers without fine sharing -- something anyone with an mp3 player has to do -- has zero chance of effectively reducing file sharing. If people are in danger of being prosecuted for uploading music they've paid for, why not Soulseek that stuff for free?
The Washington Post article pretty much sums it up:
The RIAA's legal crusade against its customers is a classic example of an old media company clinging to a business model that has collapsed. Four years of a failed strategy has only "created a whole market of people who specifically look to buy independent goods so as not to deal with the big record companies," Beckerman says. "Every problem they're trying to solve is worse now than when they started."
