ubertuber

To reiterate: they aren't really price-fixing. And fair market value is a subjective term the way it is being used. The only objective fair market value is the one the exists where sellers want to sell and buyers want to buy. And right now that's whatever a CD costs. The difference between the MLB and the RIAA isn't even what is in the post above mine (though they are all good points on the practical issues). The difference is that steroid use is illegal and record companies controlling material they own the rights to is not. It is that simple. Really.


For all of my seeming defense of the RIAA above, I want to say that roachboy is right on about outmoded notions of copyrighted material. Here's the thing. When you buy a CD, you aren't buying music. You're buying a license to listen to music. There's a difference and it isn't accidental. Nobody wants to sell you music. Not the composer, not the artist, not the producer, not the label, not the distributer, and not the retailer.

The difference is that while you can listen to a CD, you don't have the rights to the musical content on the disc. You can't transcribe it and sell it as your own. You can't memorize it and play it in concerts without purchasing the rights to do so. You can't sample excerpts and use them in a new piece of music. All of these things require a separate transaction. You're not even supposed to duplicate the CD, as you paid for that copy. What is difficult here is that many of these guidelines (in particular the one about copying) were rather self-enforcing in the days of analog distribution. It was a serious pain in the ass to make a ton of copies of something without seriously degrading the sound quality, so the viral distribution thing wasn't a problem. Now that this barrier of impracticality has been removed, people feel no compunction about taking liberties with copyrighted material that they haven't paid for.

Personally, I absolutely do not believe a single person who says that they download as a protest because the price of a CD is too high. They download because they would rather have the copyrighted material than not, and they don't want to pay. Going with my analogy from several posts back, just because I feel that a Lamborghini is unreasonably expensive doesn't mean that I get to appropriate one without paying as a protest. That's not a protest and it's not civil disobedience.

Back to roachboy being right... I think we're seeing the death throes of CD distribution, and in all likelihood the business model of record labels who depend on that sort of distribution to control content. How much longer do you think it will be before Napster, Rhapsody, or Apple begins dealing directly with artists to distribute content? That's a trick question, because they're already doing it with classical music. The NY Philharmonic and LA Philharmonic sell recordings of live concerts within a few days of the performance on the iTunes store. It's an obvious move and it benefits everybody.

While the RIAA may be technically correct in their interpretation of the law, it ain't gonna help them in the future. They need to wake up and start finding ways to utilize the current of public action rather than fight it. That's the only way for them to stay alive. It won't take much longer for artists to find ways to circumvent their lock on distribution the way their potential customers are doing.

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Cogito ergo spud -- I think, therefore I yam