Rip now or forever hold your peace

iTunes is a smash. Over 500 million songs have been legally downloaded at the wildly successful site and millions more at other less successful ones. Score one for the music industry. Peer to peer networks have been shut down or have been forced to go legit, but this has failed to marginalize rampant piracy. Let's take that point back. And so it goes, a series of victories and defeats for the music industry, a sort of tennis match where the players are us (The Consumers) and them (The Music Industry) and at stake is copyright protection. All the while, the music industry still continues to "hemorrhage" cash and whines that people aren't buying music anymore.

Perhaps realizing that it will never stamp out internet piracy, the next strategy is to schedule a re-match. At stake this time is DRM. And from the looks of it, The Consumer is getting ready to climb the net and beat their opponent silly. DRM, to date, has been an abysmal failure. Sony BMG recently was accused of installing malware on consumer's computers via its DRM software and had to release a "patch" to overcome it. No consumer I know wants to be limited in how they use their legally purchased music, but the music companies STILL don't get it. Don't believe me? Read this little ditty that came from a Times article I read just this morning:

After years of battling users of free peer-to-peer file-sharing networks (and the software companies that support them), the recording industry now identifies "casual piracy" - the simple copying and sharing of CD's with friends - as the biggest threat to its bottom line.

That, my friends, turns my blood cold. The only thing that can come from this is an even more draconian attempt by the RIAA and the music industry to limit what we do with our legally purchased music. How, exactly, is this different than copying a cassette tape? And does the RIAA interfering with the use of my music infringe upon my fair-use rights guaranteed in copyright law? I think it does and as a consumer, the music industry would do well to listen to me and others like me. We purchase their music ( or at least the stuff that's worth buying nowadays) and will cease doing so when it becomes too cumbersome to simply load a CD into our players and press play. As it stands now, different DRM schemes from different companies make interoperability a quaint fantasy. The music companies can't even decide upon ONE copyright protection scheme so how can we possibly expect them to agree on what is important to consumers? The sad fact is that music companies are not interested one whit in artists' rights. They are only interested in their bottom lines. And until that paradigm changes, we'll all suffer for it...............