It's true; I love the RIAA. (1)
Whew. It feels good to get that off my chest, to come out of the closet, to reveal our dalliance, to write this loyal canton of clandestine love and sing it loud even in the dead of night, to halloo its name to the reverberate hills and make the babbling gossip of the air cry out 'R-I-A-A!' (2)
Well, maybe I don't love everything about them... nor even most things about them. In fact, when you come right down to it, I think they're largely despicable. Yet, our concurrence on certain bedrock principles assures our continued comity. Whenever gales of contentious particulars threaten to shear our irenic bliss, we can batten down the hatches and ride out the storm in each other's arms by clinging to our shared ethos.
Our bottom line: stealing music is stealing. (3) All is right with the world when the RIAA caresses me with its slimy tentacles, fondles my engorged genitalia, and whispers in my ear, "Recorded music has value. It's the property of its owners. They deserve payment for its use."
If you don't mind, I'm going to abandon the RIAA/relationship metaphor. That tentacle thing was kind of hot, but the rest of it is starting to give me the creeps.
As I was saying, stealing music is stealing. Engaging in unauthorized duplication, denying the owner of a work their due compensation, is stealing. That's all there is to it. The pro-theft (excuse me, that wasn't PC, the pro-"sharing") faction makes all manner of specious arguments, but they all boil down to justifying larceny. It really is that simple. Everything else is rationalization.
Okay, the truth is that nothing is ever that simple. There are dozens of fronts in the intellectual property wars and dozens of skirmishes in each of copyright-related battles, many of which are inter-related and impact each other. Unfortunately, my erstwhile paramour or is on the "wrong" side in many of them. For example:
- They support overly lengthy protections. The Constitution grants Congress the authority to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." In the beginning, if an artist registered her work for copyright, she was granted a copyright of 14 years with an optional extension of 14 years. After that, her work entered the public domain. Thanks to incessant lobbying over the years, copyright protections have been extended to 95 years with the likelihood that the term will be extended once more before anything else has the opportunity to lapse into the public domain. This is clearly not the "limited times" envisioned by the founding fathers.
- They support overly broad protections. In the old days, to claim copyright you had to register your work with the copyright office. Now, you have to transfix your work into a tangible medium. That's it. There's no more registration and no more renewal; everything is presumptively copywritten. The doodles in a daydreaming junior high schooler's notebook are given 95 years of copyright protection. By contrast, a team of research scientists who spend multiple years and multi-billions of dollars developing a cure for cancer are granted 17 years of patent protection -- if the patent office accepts their petition.
- They support disproportional penalties. Illegally downloading a single song from the Internet is a federal felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. By contrast, although there are local variations, stealing a CD that contains 12 songs from a store is a misdemeanor, typically punishable by 90 days in jail and a $1000 fine. In no rational world does that disparity make sense; the theft of a physical object should be punished more severely than an additional copy of a digital file whose existence may lead to the loss of the sale.
Those are just three of the issues involved and they were painted with a very broad stroke. I'm sure that adherents of either side can, with some legitimacy, raise cavils about the finer details I've glossed over.
And that's okay. There's plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree on these issues. The eventual solution will be a compromise that balances the rights of creators with the cultural benefits of a vibrant and growing public domain.
That being said, for now, I will take the nigh heretical position and side with the RIAA. While they're rightfully pilloried for their heavy-handed enforcement tactics, they're still fighting the good fight. No one else is looking out for the artists. Okay, to be fair, the RIAA doesn't care about the artists either; their sole aim is to promote the interests of the major record labels who, almost universally, screw over their artists -- but that's a separate issue. In the end, preventing theft benefits artists and that's a position I'm comfortable with.
How will this fadge? O time! thou must untangle this, not I; it is too hard a knot for me to untie! (4)
I intended to write this missive a few months ago, but I was encouraged to read "Free Culture" by Lawrence Lessig first. Having done so, let me add my voice to the chorus of people who hail the tome as an important work in the copyright debate. Lessig argues, persuasively, that our copyright system is in need of a major overhaul. I don't agree with everything he says, and I found his solution to music piracy particularly distasteful, but the book is well worth reading.
Salivo ergo sum,
D.I. Prime
June 30th, 2008
(1) The MPAA's pretty cute too, but I saw the RIAA first and I'm a one oligarchy man.
(2) As I'm in the midst of a blog post that glorifies protecting artists from theft, it would be hypocritical not to mention that the last half of this paragraph was essentially stolen from Shakespeare. "Twelfth Night", act I, scene V, to be exact. However, since the play pre-dates copyright laws, I'm free to stea..., uh, "adapt" it as I desire.
(3) Technically, that's closer to the top line, but it's just as true whether it's at the top, the bottom, the side, upside down, backwards, on a Mobius strip or stretched into some bizarre four-dimensional tesseract.
(4) "Twelfth Night" again. Act II scene II, this time.
