The old saw that says you can't legislate morality doesn't mean you can't try to regulate moral behavior. It means that those laws don't work. The greatest political lesson about this is supposed to be Prohibition, but we haven't learned it. For three decades, laws against recreational drugs have grown increasingly stringent; the result is more drug use.Now swapping music files is illegal and the result will be the same. Presumably, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has put Napster out of business, but as I've said before, that doesn't really matter. As soon as Napster affiliated with the record business, it ceased to matter as anything but a term for what it used to be. Napster plans to survive by cutting deals with the record label cartel and charging its customers. But that isn't going to work. You don't have to spend a ton of time figuring this out. Just check out the website of the Pew and American Life Project (www.peewinternet.org), which surveyed attitudes about paying for music downloads.
According to the Pew study, 79% of music downloaders don't pay. This makes sense since 63% of them say they have stored fewer than 25 songs on their hard drive - that is, they're listening to sample. Still, it's now a crime, even though 78% of music downloaders don't think they're stealing.
Will this attitude change? The record label cartel, working closely with the FBI, plans to force it to change. If you are determined to have too many copyrighted files on your hard drive, your equipment will be seized and you will be charged with a felony. This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It has already happened at least twice, once to Jeffrey Levy in Oregon in 1999 and again last fall to Scott Wickberg, a freshman at Oklahoma University.
Levy, who had "hundreds" of files, some of them music, some of them games, paid a $25,000 fine plus who knows what in lawyer's fees. Wickberg, who had 10,200 MP3 files on his website, has been given two years "unsupervised and deferred probation," plus a $5,000 fine. He also forfeited his computer, hard drives and 44 blank CD-Rs. Very few people actually knew about the site, let alone used it, but that doesn't matter. And the disproportionate punishment - the guy with 1,000 times as many files available pays a fine five times smaller - is characteristic of the Prohibition mentality too. Look at sentencing disparities for cocaine powder and crack, which are identical drugs.
The best part is that Wickberg was apparently turned in for a bounty that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America, the cartel's lobbying and enforcement arm) pays for information on people who are too willing to share music. Maybe next year, they'll have an Elliott Ness Award for stool pigeon of the year at the Grammys. Something along that line would help remind music-lovers that every time they listen to a song without spending money they are criminals.
"Copyright owners" and "music creators" are virtually never the same thing in this society, but it's the RIAA, not anyone who represents artists, who is supposed to collect the rights fees for music on the Internet. This is ten times more disgusting than sharing music with people you don't know, for free. So here's my advice: Download all the music you can. Find ways to give money to music-makers and find ways to keep it from the record label dirt bags that don't. You're more morally justified if you love music than the people who want to turn it into nothing more than another way of generating cash. And if you get busted, make'em try you. Where the hell are they gonna get a jury to ratify their greed?
Come and get me, coppers.
(c) Copyright 2000 Dave Marsh
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