The RIAA's War on Terror
by Glider
Let me open with a caveat: File sharing is currently a violation of copyright law and is therefore considered theft of intellectual property.
Anyone caught - and prosecuted - can thus reasonably expect to be found guilty. Having said that, even the U.S. Supreme Court has set the precedent that making a mix tape for your friends is not a violation of copyright law, since mix tapes withstand the four factor test for "fair use" (see Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., for example).
Without going into all the legal jargon, the high court's reasoning can be summarized as saying that mix tapes serve as "fair use" because they fall under the "format shifting" provision (allowing you to move CDs to a MP3 player, for example), are noncommercial, and, most importantly, because one song from an album actually serves as a form of viral advertising for the album, potentially creating album sales rather than diminishing them.
These decisions do not extend to full albums, however, and therein lies the rub: Somewhere between the two extremes of "theft" and "viral advertising" lies the point the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is missing.
The problem is, the RIAA has chosen to challenge file sharing in a way similar to the current administration's offensive against terrorism.
Certainly, on the surface, the desire to rid the world of terrorists is a goal no one would criticize, but the sad fact is that the goal is patently unattainable. All it takes is one nutjob to strap explosives on himself, walk into a mall, and blow himself up, and you have an act of terrorism.
Sadly, there's no accounting for random nutjobs. Similarly, the RIAA seems to think its courtroom front in the War on File Sharing can also lead to total victory, deftly missing the point that all someone has to do is dub an album and give it to a friend and file sharing still exists.
Please understand, this is not to say the RIAA should just give up any more than the government should stop trying to find, thwart, and imprison terror cells. Still, both sides might want to take a step back and consider not so much their unattainable stated goals, but instead concentrate on the sources of their "terror."
Presidents need to study American foreign policy and how it serves to fuel - not curtail - terror, and the RIAA needs to consider the purpose of record companies in the 21st century.
The record industry, despite breaking and creating new sounds over the decades, is hardly the poster child for foresight. In the late-1990s the major labels were still sending promo CDs out for review in LP boxes.
Think about that: It meant that someone in the 1980s had bought so many LP boxes that a good decade after CDs had supplanted LPs, they still had a surplus of LP mailers. They hadn't seen the change coming, even as kids in 1985 saved up their paper route money to buy a CD player.
Even before that, the record industry, having gotten fat and rich on singles in the 1950s and 1960s, turned up its nose at what would become "album oriented rock." It wasn't until the 1970s that the majors fully embraced a format like Elektra had pioneered in the late 1960s. And now they fail to realize that, ironically, times have changed back, and we may well now be in a world where the album is dead - and this is exactly the kind of world in which file sharing will flourish.
Record companies need to recognize this and morph into promoters of bands, not albums, depending on concert ticket sales and merchandising to make their money, not on record sales. After all, even as album sales have declined due to file sharing, concert sales have actually increased, a statistic that flies in the face of the RIAA's oft trumpeted claim that "file sharing hurts the artists."
It doesn't. It hurts the (((record companies))) and, the truth be told, it only hurts them because they are unwilling to adapt. They've gotten fat and rich on album sales, and they lack the imagination and foresight to figure out how to make money some other way.
In this model, the actual recorded tracks become almost worthless, licensed to radio stations and Problogs for a pittance and used chiefly as a form of word of mouth advertising for bands, to sell tickets to concerts and stuff from the merchandise table. Many bands have discovered this on their own - look at OK Go's instant fame, based on a series of freely traded videos via YouTube, or Ween's endorsement of browntracker.net - and this is what truly terrifies the recording industry: If the music goes viral, they can't make any money off it.
The only other option is to make file sharing a null option, and in order to do that, the record companies need to cut costs - dramatically.
There's no reason a single track on iTunes should retail for more than 50 cents, nor albums for more than five dollars. The only reason prices are this high is because the industry is dictating them based on an outdated business hook that deems an album is worth at least ten dollars, all the while failing to realize that MP3s are lossy quality audio and come without album art or liner notes, the fact of which would demand to any sane person that downloading should cost considerably less than brick-n-mortar shopping.
If the record industry had the foresight, they would recognize this disparity and gut their overhead, refusing to mass produce any more albums, period. Without this upfront cost - and since bands traditionally have to use their advances to pay for recording their albums themselves - legitimate online prices could be brought to a level that wouldn't drive penniless teens to theft.
But what about the Britney Spears fans who don't own a computer or a MP3 player (or even know what one is)? Simply stated: Print on demand.
Instead of shipping copies of albums to record stores (many of which will be returned or relegated to cutout bins), send them a computer kiosk instead, where folks can go in, use a touchscreen and their credit card to buy an album, and go home with a nice CD-R, burned while they wait and delivered in a cardboard sleeve with freshly printed album art.
The technology is certainly there for this, and the sky's the limit if even one of the major labels would dump the money they spend on RIAA lawsuits into a new business model instead. In many ways, the kiosk would become a public iTunes portal, with a few extra bucks added on the back-end because you want to go home with a physical CD and album art.
Furthermore, the record companies could select popular albums for release in "limited editions" - very short runs of well packaged CDs or (for the collectors! market) LPs that sell to a discerning few for prices more in line with the 20th century business plan.
The sad fact is that when things have gotten to the point where you can settle your out of court copyright infringement lawsuit online for $1000 (www.p2plawsuits.com), but can't buy high quality tracks at a reasonable price online, it's time for the industry to step back and rethink its options.
If the Internet can be used to settle lawsuits, surely it doesn't take any level of genius to realize that it also can be used to make money off music. Still, even if some record exec reads this article and decides to adopt one of the above plans, there will still be file sharing. Why?
For the same reason there will always be terrorism: Some people will always steal things or blow things up, just for the thrill of it, no matter the sociopolitical message they try to use to justify their actions. Even if the RIAA managed to completely ban the electronic transfer of any audio or video file at, say, the ISP level, folks will just go back to the way it was done in the 1980s: tape swapping via bulletin boards.
A good business adapts to the current market. It doesn't try to force the market to fit into its outdated model. The RIAA could take the wind out of the sails of file sharing by updating its model to a print on demand format, or else concentrate on concert sales and merchandising, instead of dumping truckloads of money into a neverending series of legal battles.
And the current administration would be wise to try such new thinking with its equally unwinnable war on terror: If even half the money spent on Iraq and Afghanistan had instead been spent on energy independence, we wouldn't need any kind of relations with the countries that give rise to global terrorism in the first place, period.
If you make the reason for something to exist a null option, people lose interest in it. The trick is for those in power to have the foresight to spend their money wisely to reap future gains, instead of wasting it to fight an old model battle that can't be won.
The motion picture industry would be wise to learn this lesson now, before they go too far down the same road.