It appears that the music industry is set to start mining swapping programs with viruses and Trojans in order to stop the swell of music piracy on the Internet. According to this story it is believed that they might be violating the Federal Wiretapping laws, but according to Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy, to whom I attribute having pointed me to this story, there are some other laws they might consider looking into before they do so.
What a dilemma! Of course, the music industry has a right to its copyrights. They get their return on that every time someone buys one of their highly overpriced CDs. Once it is out of the store, it becomes my property to do with what I choose. Of course, most of mine sit in the CD stand and hardly ever get heard, unless I just get in the mood to hear a certain song or something. Most of the time, I listen to the radio ... the music seems so much nicer when it is interspersed with idiotic infantile banter by DJs and plus I get to hear all those commercials. But I also get to hear songs that are not in the my CD collection. I suppose I should send them a nickel every time I listen to a song, but then, wait, didn't they provide that CD to the radio station free of charge so that I would hear that song, become so enamored with the unique sound that I would run right down to Walmart and plunk down $20 of my hard owned money for my very own copy of a CD having that song on it? I do not download music off of the Internet. I have too little interest in the music to care to tie up my bandwidth to do so. I do not photocopy books either, because it costs more to photocopy a book that to buy one. If I was the music industry, what I would do is bring down the price of CDS so that they were more affordable. That might cause people to be more willing to buy the music. Then I would invest my money in the coming up with a new format for playing music at home, in the cars, and elsewhere, buy a company to make the product to play the new format, and then give the player away, so that no one would have any excuse not to have one. Oops, wait, some hacker would tear his apart, figure out how it works, figure out how to copy and distribute the new format, and publish all the details on the Internet. Well, still, even a non-music fanatic like me would buy more CDS if the price was reasonable. It seems that the biggest problem the music industry faces is dealing with its own greed.
And me, I am probably just weird, as I really am not all that concerned whether the music industry makes all that money anyway. I figure most Americans work a lot harder than most of the music industry executives just to make a living and probably should not be spending so much money on music which goes to support all those people blowing coke up their noses and pretending they are better than the rest of the world. Maybe if the price of coke went down, the people in the music industry would be less worried about how much money they make.
Posted by Tiger at May 4, 2003 07:23 PM