] Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA said that HR 107
] would allow the sale of hacking tools that would bust
] through the Digital Rights Management of iTunes and other
] services if the hacker is using the copies for
] "non-infringing purposes."
]
] His view was that there is no way to assure that any tool
] is only used for non-infringing purposes and that the
] only way to make this possible was to impose a tech
] mandate for copy controls, which HR 107 does not contain.
] And he went on to say that it is impossible to create a
] technology that will permit "fair uses" while prohibiting
] other uses.

How disconnected from reality is the RIAA? Its seems if something *could* be used in an unlawful way, we must control and/or restrict it.

[ As far as they're concerned, yeah, that's pretty much right. And he's also correct that there is no way to permit fair uses and prohibit illegal ones with the same technology. So the argument boils down to : Do my rights as a consumer trump their rights as producers? The answer has to be yes, and in a relatively free market, that's exactly the case. I'm not making a value judgement here, or I'm trying not to, but I think the US generally tries to be a free-market economy, and that generally means that it's up to businesses to ensure that their product is viable.

Ultimately, in the music industry, it may well be all of us who suffer the worst, because in the absense of any compensation mechanism, far fewer people will bother to pick up a guitar and create. But then, there's a decent argument that rarifying the landscape of professional musicians wouldn't be all bad, by the way, so maybe a post-music-industry world would be just as artistic as the current one, or more so, and things would be better as people compensate, directly, the artists that most move them.

I guess the point though is that the content industries may be fucked, and there may not be a solution for them in this world. The people need to feel that what they're getting is worth what they're paying, otherwise they won't do it.

No matter what, broaching this topic you get into deep discussions about how people don't have the long view to see that supporting musicians now keeps them around in the future, or about how most of the money made from music is concentrated in a relatively miniscule percentage of the whole (and not the most skillful percentage either).

I still think that in this economy, it's not right for laws and regulations to unduly cripple my computer so that the content producers can sell me movies that I probably don't even want to see. And for the record, I'm not anti-drm. I think Apple's Fairplay is fine. I bought it, so i can play it. I can authorize my other computers to play it across the network, and I can burn it onto a CD and re-rip it if I want to play it on my TiVo or non-apple player. As a consumer, this works great for me -- far better than Kazaa or whatever could hope to be.

I'd like to think that ultimately the dust will settle and a compromise will be found... ideally one in which marketing is a minimal factor and in which the artist gets a much greater cut of the profit. Certainly an issue to keep watch on... and write your congressmonkey if it's on debate, i suppose. -k]

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