Posted 5/14/2007 05:54:00 PM by Douglas

The RIAA is at it again, this time targeting college students with their litigious zeal over file sharing.

Barg couldn't imagine anyone expected her to pay $3,000 — $7.87 per song — for some 1980s ballads and Spice Girls tunes she downloaded for laughs in her dorm room. Besides, the 20-year-old had friends who had downloaded thousands of songs without repercussion.

"Obviously I knew it was illegal, but no one got in trouble for it," Barg said.

Typical legal strong-arming. Go after college students who don't have any money and offer a relatively cheap buy-out so as to scare the crap out of the other million students that are file sharing.

I'm not going to add any value to the millions of column inches that have been devoted to this in the past, and the intellectual property aspects of file sharing are complicated, but where the RIAA is fundamentally wrong is that a shared file does not equate to a lost CD sale. It's not hard to imagine that a person might download a song or two by someone they're curious about and then go buy their entire catalog. Or, on the other hand, they could listen to that one song and realize it's total crap. Stealing a CD in a store is much more heinous because that theft prohibits someone else from buying it. File sharing doesn't even come close, and for an new upstart band without distribution, file sharing is their answer to their prayers: Getting their music out through the most efficient means available.

"Technically, I'm guilty. I just think it's ridiculous, the way they're going about it," Barg said. "We have to find a way to adjust our legal policy to take into account this new technology, and so far, they're not doing a very good job."

Technically, you're an idiot. Of course you're "guilty," but that doesn't mean it's OK just because it's a dumb law.

The only positive outcome from this is that the RIAA's spiraling legal costs will become prohibitive (even for their deep pockets), thus adding so much cost to each CD price that the studio system collapses under it's own legal fees. Then we can start over.

Labels: RIAA