The music cartels have bragged that they are going to make examples of a few hundred of the ten million or so people who are in file sharing networks. Now when someone threatens to make an example of someone else, they are implying that they will be treated with unfair severity in order to frighten others away from "sinning" in the first place. Making an example is unjust by definition, but the power to perpetrate that injustice is what the industry has been buying. They have even prosecuted the actions of a 12 year old girl, fining her parents thousands of dollars. And all this is being perpetrated under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. This act extended copyright protection to computer users sharing music files among themselves.

The motivation behind such legislation is easy to find. For example, take Saban Entertainment, a company which gave $439,376 to the Democrats during the 1998 election cycle, according to opensecrets.org. As legislation favorable to Saban’s interests is generated, there seems to be a reciprocal generation of political donations. In the 2000 election cycle they contributed $1,603,650 and for 2002 it was $9,333,000 making what is now Saban Capital Group (which not coincidentally “is looking to strengthen its holdings through the acquisition of artist catalogues”) the top contributor of soft money to the Democrats. On Saban’s website it says that Ron Kenan, president of Saban Music Group “…is considered to be among the top authorities in the field of music publishing and royalty collections, and has devised some of the most sophisticated tools used in controlling music rights”

Evolving technology has been good to the music distribution cartels. They have sold me the same albums on vinyl, 8 track, cassette and most recently, CDs. With each new generation of technology the product became easier to manufacture and distribute while the prices held steady or increased. But that same technology has also worked for the consumer and now the average person has vast access to recorded material and can easily make their own high quality copies. This is what the record companies are really afraid of; the issue is less about copyright infringement than about controlling the means of production. For many years the recording industry owned the means of recording and distributing music. Very few private citizens had their own pressing equipment for vinyl records and aspiring musical acts were at the mercy of the corporations, which as often as not proved to be no mercy at all. But the amazing progress of digital electronics and computers has put personal digital recording studios and duplication methods within the reach of virtually anyone. It was not a criminal conspiracy, it was progress.

Things like downloading are what we expect from technology, computers have changed a lot about the world and a lot of businesses have been shaken up and even overwhelmed by the worldwide scale of internet interaction. It’s not fair or politically wise to protect certain industries. The telegraph had to give way to the telephone, radio to television. The Central Pacific railroad was opposed by special interests as diverse as Welles Fargo, to protect their stagecoach interests, and ice merchants in Alaska who had to send their product to California by boat. The government is wrong when it tries to protect, with our tax money, businesses that are falling prey to economic evolution. The fact that there are millions of people all around the world who can share music among themselves is a good thing, certainly not a criminal conspiracy. Calling it “piracy” is deceptive. If one downloaded copyrighted material, made copies and sold them, that would be piracy and clearly a case of copyright infringement, but that is not what is happening. I have found columns I’ve written posted all over the internet, at sites I’d never heard of. Great, I’m delighted that people seem to like what I say and that more folks will read it and even print copies. But if someone took my columns and sold them for their own profit, I’d be beaucoup cheesed off. A copyright gives the owner exclusive right to sell the intellectual product. It should not restrict the use of that product in any other way by the purchasers.

The people who share and compile their own music collections are mostly the ones least able to pay the inflated prices of commercial CDs. The affluent will still buy the more attractively packaged and easily obtained commercial product because it isn’t worth their time to spend the several hours necessary to put it together themselves. Record Co. executives will have to thin their own herd and work for more reasonable salaries. No more multi-million golden parachutes or eight figure salaries. Big time performers will still get rich doing what they love but they too will lose their monopoly as downloading allows unknown groups to independently perform for millions of people without a major label promotion. In the words of Adam Eisgrau, Executive Director of P2P United a group formed by the six leading file sharing networks (and the people who paid the $2,000 fine of the aforementioned 12 year old), "We don't condone copyright infringement, but it's time for the RIAA's winged monkeys to fly back to the castle and leave the Munchkins alone"

As our civil rights as guaranteed by the constitution are eroded and compromised by the federal government on a daily basis, the privileges of big donors are treated as a protected species. The extension of copyright protection to file sharing by computer was a wrong move. You and I can’t afford to buy the legislators that the corporations can so once again the laws are not written for us, they are written against us.

©2003 Lee Robinson

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