Sunday, February 19, 2006

The War Against Music The music industry's acting like a bunch of thugs.  In New York, Patti Santangelo, a mother who's being sued for illegal file-sharing, has decided to fight back.  The RIAA has offered to settle her suit for a few thousand dollars, but she's not taking the offer.  Instead, she's gone public with her fight, and managed to raise enough cash from online supporters to hire a proper lawyer.  (Go to www.fightgoliath.com to help the cause.)  She is the first victim of a RIAA scaresuit to  aggressively fight the RIAA's legal onslaught.  But now it's getting ugly.  The RIAA has apparently decided to go after her children - not directly, but by digging up personal information it plans to unveil in open court.  What kind of personal information?  It's not specified in the article, but imagine your own personal history as it can be seen on the internet.  Your Google searches.  Your entries on bulletin boards.  Every recipe, every photograph, every news item you've ever clicked on, shared in court for all to see.  Now imagine you're a teenager, in the festering stew of hormones, peer pressure, and terror that we all remember too well.   This is character assassination and the threat of public humiliation wielded as a weapon.  The RIAA lawsuits are an amazing spectacle of the (big) music industry trying to burn down their fan base.  They're ignoring the obvious problem (most music on the airwaves and in the mall record stores sucks) and have decided that downloading and filesharing are causing the decline in record sales.   Music labels are finally starting to splinter off from the monolith:  Nettwerk, home to Barenaked Ladies, Sarah MacLachlan, and Bluesky favorite Hem, has decided to join a Texas man also fighting back against the RIAA.  Nettwerk is paying the legal expenses of David Greubel, who is being sued for allegedly sharing the music of Nettwerk artist Avril Lavigne, among other tracks.  Nettwerk executive Terry McBride is speaking out against the "crazy" behavior of the RIAA.  "The fan is the future. Suing the fan is like shooting yourself in the foot." Sharing music creates buzz, which makes artists.  Witness the Arctic Monkeys, England's latest phenomenon, a literal file-sharing success story.  The band's word-of-mouth groundswell of support is impossible to imagine without file-sharing, and the semi-old-fashioned way of sharing music, via home-burned CDs. But we live in an era where the wild-eyed RIAA lawyers are saying that the simple act of burning your own CDs onto your own computer to use on your own MP3 player may be illegal.   This is no longer about protecting artists' rights.  The lawyers are running amok, and they have lost their ability to be reasonable.  They have lost the right to pretend that they representing anything good and decent about music.  They represent nothing more than dollar signs.  What ever happens next in this war, one can only think that the Goliath will get what it truly deserves.  4:03:40 PM    Speak up!  []