DRM News

I’m coming Elizabeth!! Its the big one!

Haven’t you heard? The music industry is dying.

What? You’re skeptical? Why would you say that? Well of course you heard that line before. I mean as far back as 1979 they were saying that Video Killed the Radio Star.

And look at the state of radio music now. Its completely dead isn’t it?

Or maybe you heard about how home taping is killing music? I mean this was such a huge issue that Canada added a levy on all blank cassette tapes to pay artists for their ‘stolen’ work. They’ve recently expanded that to include MP3 players as well.

Of course today the buzz is about higher and higher rates of piracy and all kind of little industry groups have popped up to tell you how bad it is and how it effects not just the Recording Industry Corporations, but also the artists. But what happens when its the RIAA doing the stealing? Courtney Love made a great speech about this in 2000. (yes it does feel weird saying ‘Courtney Love’ and ‘great speech’ in the same sentence, but in this case its true.) Right now in a heated lawsuit between YouTube and Viacom, YouTube let the cat out of the bag saying that Viacom would upload videos, only to later demand their removal under DMCA.

"[Viacom] deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom."

In Mexico last year an artist had to have police raid a Sony Music office to get 6,000 CDs Sony had refused to return. The artist’s contract had ended with Sony, and Sony decided to release another CD of his music, they ignored his cease and desist, they ignored everything and kept selling his music.

Piracy is bad, I do not condone it for any reason, but the music industry itself is guilty as hell in all of this, and quite possibly even more so because they are doing it for profit, and not just to get free music. Until they fess up and admit that they have been treating their own artists badly and pirating music themselves, they are never going to get out of the tarnished image they’ve put themselves into.

The UK ISP TalkTalk recently asked Dan Bull to create a new song concerning the Digital Economy Bill. I think he did a fine job.

(For those of you too young to remember, the top picture is from a TV show called Sanford and Son. Fred Sanford, played by Redd Foxx, would constantly fake a heart attack. I think maybe the RIAA watched too many episodes.)