Stupid STUPID RIAA
My god…how dumb can they get? If the RIAA just slashed their budget for lawyers, and put that cashish into something useful like, ohhh, I dunno, R&D into new products, maybe they wouldn’t be in such trouble.
Consider that the CD came out in the early 80’s, and there has been no new distribution medium since then…the single largest incremental revenue in Hollywood history was the introduction of entire catalogues into DVD…there was a similar burst for the record industry with the advent of the CD…get the idea RIAA? DVD-A could be the big breakthrough. I’d love to have Van Halen’s entire catalogue on one DVD…that would kick ass. How about Led Zepplin’s catalogue on a DVD…wow, I could replace a dozen or so CD’s with a couple of DVD’s. For me and my space conscious mind, that makes sense.
Of course I could just rip them and a couple of thousand other CD’s to a $160.00 120gig Hard Drive and sell my entire CD collection to a Used CD store and have everything on a single hard drive that I could share out with my house and burn to CD-RW’s as needed…
But noooo, now they’re going to sue their consumers back into the stone ages. Individual file traders are being fined upwards of 10k per song they have available to share. Much like Canada’s marijuana laws, it’s not illegal to posess digital files, it’s not illegal to download them, but it is illegal to make them available for sharing.
Of course the irony is that Recording Industry has created this beast themselves. It used to be just the hardcores who knew about Napster, Music City, Grockster, LimeWire, et-al, but because of the endless coverage on CNN, everybody and their brother knows where to get free music. Good work RIAA!