Hold my tongue?

I wish I could. In school I was a good student but I always got bad marks for talking too much in class. It must be genetic. I see the same things on my mom’s yellowed report cards.  And I unintentionally passed the gene to my son, who transformed curiosity and love of conversation into an even higher art form: class clown. Fortunately, he has put this gene to good use in his chosen career as actor/writer. And I often take advantage of this gene for mouthing off. Ranting is the perfect outlet for me! But sometimes I regret it. I hope this time I won’t.

What is wrong with the entire music industry? Are they all suffering from collective insanity? My office was abuzz last week with the news of the RIAA “victory” against a file sharer, a 30 year old woman who was fined $220,000 for sharing 1700 music files. How completely ridiculous! Where is the RIAA case against Newscorp, the publicly traded company that has been endorsing and profiting from illegal filesharing for two years?

I want to hold my tongue. I should hold my tongue. I’m working with major and independent record labels, doing my bit to resuscitate an ailing music industry, standing up proudly for copyright protection and against piracy, yet here I am about to tell them in black and white that they are all stupid! I must be the stupid one!

When consumers, all several hundred million of them, can access free music available on p2p sites, is it really possible that the RIAA believes that fines to the little guy are the answer? Do they have the manpower to sue all of them? Shouldn’t they focus their attention on getting a bigger bang, rather than trying to squeeze blood from the proverbial stone? I keep harping on about MySpace and the music industry’s willingness to continue turning a blind eye. I did a back of the napkin calculation last December when I launched this blog. I recall that at $150,000 per copyright infringement (although the court in Minnesota only ordered Jammie Thomas to pay $9,250 for each of the 24 tracks RIAA concentrated on) MySpace would be fined gazillions of dollars (please excuse the typical American exaggeration here, but with so many millions of tracks being illegally streamed on MySpace it is kind of hard to do the math)! And Newscorp is a public company with shareholders, listed on a US exchange.

RIAA’s web page says its mission is “to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members' creative and financial vitality. Its members are the record companies that comprise the most vibrant national music industry in the world.”

A Columbia Records lawyer giving evidence on this case have made bad things even worse, if not completely insane: she said that ripping your own CDs to your iPod is illegal. Give me a break!

So we have to ask ourselves, as music lovers and artists, how can RIAA achieve its mission on behalf of record companies? Promoting members’ creative and financial vitality can be done in many ways. Fostering creativity requires income, but not necessarily at the expense of promotion to and consumption by the very consumers who are the audience of artists and labels and who ultimately generate all of the revenue. We cannot put the p2p genie back into the bottle. Nor can we convince music lovers that they should pay over and over and over again for the same album they bought years ago and lost or scratched. We can’t convince teenagers to get an after school job to pay for the music they have found or traded with their friends. We want them to consume music so that when they are grown up and have loads of their own money to spend they will go to concerts, buy t-shirts, download music they pay for and visit entertainment discovery destinations where there are revenues that get shared with the copyright owners.

This leads me back to Google and Newscorp. What is wrong with their shareholders? How can they tolerate the fact that they have invested in companies that have ignored copyright law for years and have failed to share revenue generated from advertising off the back of illegal streaming, which in my mind is corporate file sharing or, even worse, unlicensed broadcasting of the music these same record labels are trying to sue individuals over. I doubt anyone on Wall Street will read this blog, although I plan to extend its readership in the not too distant future. But hey, let’s get real. All of you label people out there, wake up! There is a much bigger gravy train to go after! And I’m sure once shareholder activists are lobbied, they will even pick up the tab for the litigation against corporate pirates. It did take awhile for the likes of Enron and Martha Stewart to get caught, but their theft or misappropriation was much more subtle. This current case is about ethics, piracy, stealing, ownership, copyrights and many other principles yet the RIAA is targeting the infringer most unlikely to have any meaningful impact or to help them uphold their self-stated mission.

Creativity and the rewards generated from such will require good relationships between consumers and artists (and their representative labels), not antagonism. This case is a classic example of the old world model being used to bully the new, the old guys totally detached from the present and the world in which consumers live and consume creative content today. Stand aside. Get into therapy and try to make some friends, not enemies.

I am one of the most hard-core supporters of the protection of copyrights and the payments of royalties. But this is going too far. I just hope that attacking the record labels and their henchmen won’t give corporate pirates a reason to cut off my tongue. But maybe I’d deserve it because I certainly can’t hold it.

Posted at 11:03AM Oct 09, 2007 by Shelley Taylor in Music  |  Comments[8]