jeremy borger [blog]

Well, a friend of mine told me that I should updat…

Well, a friend of mine told me that I should update my blog more. So here ya go, Erik.

And actually, I log in today to find that Blogger has changed its interface. Nothing seems too strange yet, but I hope this posts okay.

Since Barrel o’ Monkeys hasn’t been active in months, MacComedy has slowed to a crawl (although I still really like that web site, get good response and really want to update it more but I’m just so frickin’ lazy), and The Jeremy Borger Show is stuck in rerun world and probably will be for a long, long time, what should I write about?

Maybe about how it’s so frickin’ hot in here right now. It’s only 82F but humid as a mofo. And I’m too cheap to turn on the air conditioning. Aw, screw it. I’ll turn it on.

There we go. The AC’s in the other room so it should be cool here in about five hours. It’s bad when you’re just sitting still in one place and sweating. Maybe I should go swimming… Now do you see why I never get anything done?

Digital music. Peer-to-peer. File sharing. Kazza, Grokster, Morpheus, blah, blah, blah. It’s been in the news lately because the Record Industry Association of America is planning on suing those who are illegally trading music files online. That means pretty much anyone who has music on their computer and is offering it to be downloaded by others.

There’s a lot of people out there who think that the recording industry is evil and that the way it does business is corrupt. I’m not an expert in that area so I don’t know if what they’re doing is moral or if every record executive is a spawn of Satan. People also complain that the costs of CDs are too high and that they’re forced to buy a bunch of crappy songs just to get a few good ones on a CD. Fine. That may all be true. However, not agreeing with the way a company does business is not an excuse for stealing. Wal-Mart may have unfair business practices, but that doesn’t mean we should go into the store and shoplift whatever we want.

Some people don’t like comparing trading/sharing/copying music to shoplifting. They argue that music is not a physical item and that there’s really no cost to the business if you merely digitally copy a music file somehow. But it’s content and therefore doesn’t have the same business model as selling something like a shoe from Nike, which is a physical product. Content still has value and still has a price to it. There’s copyright laws out there that were established to protect content (music, books, software, movies, poems, etc) and therefore have a way that whoever made the content (or whoever has the rights to it) can profit from it.

So the obvious loss to the record company is that if I want to go buy the latest Madonna CD (which I don’t) but instead I download it for free and burn the CD myself, the $10, $12, $15 (or whatever) that would have gone to the company now stays in my pocket, but yet I still get the content. The problem is that the RIAA sees a 16-year-old kid with 5,000 songs and tries to say that each one of those songs is a lost sale. Uh, no. If the average CD has 15 songs, that’s over 333 CDs. When I was 16, getting free music off the Internet wasn’t an option and I had nowhere near 333 CDs. Nor did any other 16-year-old I knew.

When you can get music for free, you’re much more likely to have it. I might download a couple of Eninem songs, but there’s no way I’d go out a spend money for those songs. If I couldn’t download them for whatever reason, I’d just say, “Hm. Bummer,” and go read a book.

But the 16-year-old kid with 5,000 songs probably would have bought SOME CDs if he couldn’t download his music for free. Let’s say he would have bought 12. So that’s 12 lost CD sales due to illegally downloaded music. So it DOES hurt the record labels, just not as much as they claim.

Again, people yell, “Well, the RIAA is evil! They rip off artists! We should pirate to protest!” If you really want to protest, don’t listen to the music. Don’t buy it, don’t listen to it, don’t give it as gifts, don’t steal it. Because the RIAA looks at Kazza and thinks (however wrong this thought may be), “Look, there’s 10 terabytes of music out there an 90 percent of it is from artists we represent! They obviously love the music but there’s not paying for it! Let’s sue!” Instead, don’t buy/steal/listen/share. Then they’ll look at Kazza and think, “Hm, there’s 500 gigabytes of stuff being traded out there, and 90 percent of it is porn! They’re not downloading our music anymore and CD sales are still down. Could there be something wrong with our product or our business practices? We better see how we can change this.”

Protest is fine. Protest by stealing is stupid. That’s like saying you’re going to go on a hunger strike by never eating food you pay for and only eating the food you steal. Yeah, that’s really making a statement.

And that’s one of the things that pisses me off about some people in the “RIAA sucks! P2P 4 eva!” movement. They act and talk (or type) like they’re all about supporting the artists and fighting the man, when really they just want free stuff. They’re mooching leeches masquarading as activists. Not all of them. But many.

The RIAA has tried to sue P2P businesses themselves. They’ve successfully taken down Napster. (well, it’s coming back under Roxio. We’ll see how that goes.) I think that route is wrong because peer-to-peer has MANY legitimate uses. Makers of P2P software or companies shouldn’t be sued for illegal music being traded on their systems anymore than ISPs should. It’s like suing the phone company for illegal behavior discussed over their lines. Silly.

I also think it’s stupid for the RIAA to be able to hack computers of those it suspects of illegally trading music. And the RIAA being able to force ISPs (WITHOUT A COURT ORDER!) to give the names, addresses, and phone numbers of those it suspects of illegally trading files is also insane. But that’s due to that crazy DMCA law and that’s another blog…

Still, the rules of distribution of a particular content should be controlled by the copyright holder. I put up this blog and other websites for free. This article is a type of content, but I choose to not charge for it. But, if someone wants to charge someone $1 to look at his blog and someone then takes that blog and distributes it to others for free, I think the blogger should be able to sue and win. It’s his blog. He should have control over the content, how it may be distributed and what it should cost.

So what’s the best way to enforce this copyright law? Copyright law is going to stand so fighting it is just going to make the government suggest wacko things like destroying computers. I guess I’m in limbo right now. Maybe it’s the heat… Sorry to make you have to read all this and then not give a final solution. If you have any ideas, let me know and we’ll discuss it more in the future. Happy Fourth of July!

(there, Erik. Happy?)