Avast, ye scurvy dogs!

I've been meaning to blog about this particular issue for a while now, but for one reason or another never got around to finishing it, so I apologize if the content of this particular post is somewhat dated.

I was all set to start ranting about this article that I saw a few weeks ago awarding $1.92 million to the RIAA from a Minnesota woman accused of sharing 1700 songs on Kazaa (that's over $1000/song), when I came across this article about BitTorrenters going anonymous (which I'll come back to in a sec). I think the first article really speaks for itself; suffice it to say that I'm very angry and more than a little confused that anyone, let alone a full jury's worth of people, could find that judgment reasonable.

It nevertheless seems inevitable to me that the only possible outcomes of all this are the end of the RIAA, radical changes in the way music is sold and marketed, rewriting of intellectual property laws, or some combination of the three. Piracy and the pirate culture on the internet have perpetually been a step ahead of efforts to prevent piracy and crack down on offenders. If the latter article I mentioned is any indication, this is a trend that seems unlikely to change. It seems to me that a new strategy is called for on the part of record companies, one that views a pirated song not as stolen property or a lost sale but as a missed opportunity.

There are a lot of steps record companies could take to show they care about their customers and not just about their bottom line; a show of good faith would go along way towards dispelling the idea that the RIAA is comprised of out-of-touch old men clinging desperately to a bygone era, trying to milk as much money as they can from a broken system. Let me sample music for free online (I mean whole songs and albums, not 30 second clips of such terrible quality it's barely possible to pick out a tune), and don't be such dicks about online radio; that's where I hear about music, and it's safe to say that it's been a large contributor in almost all my music purchases for the past several years. As a corollary, realize that just because someone pirates a song (or otherwise obtains it for free) does not mean that they would be willing to spend actual money on that song if it was not available for free. Don't treat the people who do actually invest in your product like criminals; it seems obvious, to me at least, that if the product you're charging me money for is of poorer quality (read: features DRM) than the product I can obtain for free (albeit illegally), there's not a whole lot of incentive for me to purchase the "legitimate" copy.

Anyway, that's my rant, such as it is. I'm certainly not expecting to see anything like the changes I've mentioned in the near future, but this is an issue I'll be watching with continued interest.

kgb

So I saw this TV commercial for a service called kgb which charges a fee to answer questions you text to them via your cell phone. And I can't help with wonder who exactly is the target demographic of this service. People who've never heard of Google? Old people who are trying to figure out what all this "text messaging" hoopla is about? If it's that last bunch, it seems like it might be wiser if your company name didn't conjure up memories of the Cold War to the group still old enough to actually remember it.