RIAA Hires ATF Chief - Now The Copyright Cops May Really Bust Down Your Door
from the great... dept
The latest hire by the RIAA is Bradley Buckles, the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He's going to head up their anti-piracy efforts and their relationship with law enforcement agencies. I'd imagine this isn't good news for anyone involved in file sharing. It certainly doesn't suggest that the recording industry is looking for a discussion about how to update their business model, but would prefer to simply bust down doors and throw people in jail. If he's really going after true counterfeiting operations that are making up fake CDs and selling them on the streets, that's fine - and his experience could be helpful. However, if he starts sending the police and other law enforcement after 12-year-old kids downloading nursery rhymes, it might not go over so well.
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Is that supposed to scare us? Good for him. At least he's employable.
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New business model
Okay, here's the new supporting business model.
1. Create a COPS like reality show where camera crews follow this guy and his team of enforcers serving subpoenas, seizing computers, and otherwise enforcing (their) Truth, (their) Justice, and (their version of) The American Way.
2. Sydnicate and earn fees based on traditional teevision market rules, since they understand those.
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Truth Stranger than Fiction
Now there will be a grain of truth behind all those pictures from the Elian Gonzalez operation with "RIAA" crudely Photoshopped on the uniforms of the guys with the guns. (Search back through fark.com Photoshop contests to see what I mean.)
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Inevitability
The "War Against Piracy" is a war that cannot be won.
Well, not realistically.
DRM, content management OSs, government action, fines, lawsuits, legal changes, etc will have little long-term effect. Why? Because free information is widely disseminated. Right now I can download one mp3 in a minute; in ten years it will be one video in a minute; in twenty years it will be one video store in a minute.
Of course, a country can make laws to limit hard disk size and bandwidth. I'll be the first out of such a country. In the long run, free countries will out-innovate countries with "disk size limits."
Stop trying to fight a war that cannot be won. There's no way to combat the new "digital sin" of piracy; we'll just have to update our social systems accordingly.
PS: Compare this with the machine technology developed in the 18th century; according to Marx, such technology was the cause of the downfall of feudalism and the rise of the free market/capitalism. Compare the medieval Church's doctrine with Copyright law. We have "material freedom", as a result of "material technology". We have yet to obtain "idea-expression freedom", but if it came, it would be a result of "idea-expression technology", i.e. the home printing press, the PC.
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