An open letter to the RIAA

Dear members of the RIAA:

With each assertion, you become less credible. Your recent proclamation that copying music to a computer from a legally-purchased CD is illegal is simply laughable, and flies in the face of the very raison d’etre of the burgeoning MP3 hardware industry, an industry substantially healthier than your own.

I own many CDs, legally purchased. I also have the music from those CDs on my computer and my iPod such that I might listen to your products with greater convenience than your own efforts would afford me. I have no intention of deleting said material, and fully intend to transfer more music to my computer from legally-purchased CDs. The supposed illegality of this act is not stated in the DMCA, nor is it implied, nor was it ever intended. It is merely a position taken such that you might justify charging your customers multiple times for the same material, an indefensible position when you consider that much of this material is not worth the price of downloading it for free.

As a matter of legality I am forced to defer to your position in the matter of downloading music which I did not purchase, but as a matter of ethics I would rather download an album I like and write the artist a check for ten dollars, as compared to the pittance the artist would receive from the tortuous, Machiavellian obscurantism of the contract they have with you.

If it has not happened already, I submit that you are rapidly drawing near a critical mass, beyond which the fees being paid to your lawyers exceed the monies you would have received had the illegal downloads been paid for. You are fighting a war which you lost several years ago. To escalate this war would be an act of folly comparable only to the wars waged for a village idiot’s imperialist Presidency.

It is shocking to me, as a longtime music aficionado, to see that the industry which brought forth the Beatles has sunk so low as to spend most of its budget promoting talentless hacks whose music has neither cultural meaning nor artistic value. The RIAA itself has become a malignancy infesting the lifeblood of modern music. The very industry, as exemplified by your frantic clinging to a long-obsolete business model, is deteriorating in the manner of a beautiful person dying of cancer.

The record-buying public, as the medical staff treating your cancer, have a decision to make: they can take the risk of a transplant, hoping to move your operation to a modified business model untainted by the profiteering and repressive regime under which you have operated, or to simply let their patient die, and turn their attention to a music-industry rebirth exemplified most recently by Radiohead’s release of a disc subject to their own artistic control and the fans’ response – which was overwhelmingly positive, and indeed netted the band a far greater recompense for their efforts than they ever received through their label.

Personally, this member of said medical team will have no compunctions whatsoever in bidding you adieu.