Corante has a post about the RIAA attempting to stamp out "Casual Piracy" and make criminals of us all. I'm reminded yet again of Zappa predicting a time when music is made illegal.

Two posts from me in the comments.


A little vignette from last year.

I decide I want to buy Zero7's latest album. I walk down to the record store and notice the "Copy Protection", "This is not a CD" label on the CD and decide not to buy it (£14 saved). I walk back home and a quick search shows that AllofMp3.com have the album available in MP3 192Kb VBR so I buy it from there instead (£0.80 spent).

This year, the store closed down.


I'm not condoning this but merely reporting it.

A DVD-RW holds what? 5Gb? I know people who have burnt their collection of MP3s to 3 or 4 of these and take them round to their friends to copy onto their computers.

An 80Gb 2.5" disk and a USB2 case is what? $150? I know people who have filled one up and keep it in their shoulder bag. Dumping the whole lot onto somebody else's computer and dumping their files onto the disk takes an hour at most.

Who needs P2P when you can share with friends and family by the 10s of Gb? And with no risk of being chased by the RIAA via their ISP.

So here's two aphorisms. "Why is it my fault if your business model is screwed?" and "Just Say No To DRM". If the current content business disappeared you think people would stop making music or being paid to do it?


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[ 17-Jun-05 9:02am ] [ , ]