News Backing up your CDs is now illegal

A few thoughts come to mind... I don't listen to a lot of music, but this affects other areas as well. So here goes.

Firstly, I don't know how many of you remember this, but the reaction to home video casette recorders was basically, "People are going to just make copies of *everything* and our sales will fall off and it's the end of the world!" Well, that didn't happen... In fact their sales *increased*... I can definitely see the same kind of thing happening with non-physical media, provided they pull their heads out from wherever they've managed to stick them and take advantage of it.

Secondly, the simple fact is that some people will pirate music, and some people won't. They're spending large amounts of money trying to make it more difficult for people to pirate music, but you know, all their fancy DRM software and copy protection schemes don't keep me from simply running a cable from the output of whatever I'm using to play their media to the input of whatever I want to use to record it and making all the copies I want. The only way they could get around that would be to remove the audio output from the playback devices on which their media will function... Which kind of defeats the purpose...

In other words, they're spending a lot of money to "prevent piracy" when it can not possibly work and the only result is that they have to increase their prices, which does nothing but encourage more piracy that they have no way of stopping... If the music can be played, it can be pirated. Period. They are wasting their time.

The simple fact of the matter is that the recording industry has long enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the creation and distribution of music becuase recording equipment and the means of distribution were expensive. Now that monopoly is going away. They are not trying to "prevent piracy" they are trying to maintain their monopoly. They're doing their best to make it so that the small time recorders and distributors cannot possibly compete. They're trying to expand their monopoly into the playback hardware as well, and when people make their irritation with this known, they take them to court. The goal of making copying music from one playback device to another illegal is not to prevent piracy, it's to make it so that only *their* sanctioned, controled, and expensive playback devices have any use to the average person. Personally I find it to be borderline disgusting.

The idea behind copyright and patent laws was to encourage creation and invention by giving people a way to gain back the resources they invested in creating them. The idea was *NOT* to give people total, permanent control, because that stifles innovation. And yet that's mostly what groups like the RIAA are trying to do.

 

All i have to say is that they are dirty b*stards