Life in the Network

First off I wanted to say that I don't really feel that bad for the RIAA and all of their woes over file-sharing programs and copyright infringement. To me, they took an entirely incorrect path by suing everyone who was using file-sharing programs. Instead of attempting to find out what your market is doing as Apple did with Itunes, the RIAA just pushed their customer base away. By using such ruthless tactics, the RIAA had effectively alienated the people who were the source of all their income. I remember when this happened that many of my other friends and I decided to avoid purchasing music cd's for a while until Itunes came around with their song purchasing system. In final, I do not necessarily condone downloading illegal file sharing but I definitely do not agree with the way that the RIAA handled that whole situation. Also, I fully applaud Apple for being a reasonable company and seeing that their customers demanded something and fully supplying it. I find it to be simple economics, consumers found another source besides the RIAA's oligopoly on music and they responded by suing them for it, instead of behaving in free market manners as Apple did. The Victor Hugo quote in the Wired 8.10 article best sums up my beliefs on that matter, "An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come".

In a response to DRM I believe that Apple just created this concept to appease the oligopolies (yes, the they own 70% of the market share in the music industry so its hard to argue that they hold unfavorable oligopolistic properties) of the big four when they created the Itunes store. In Job's statement on Apple's website, he even states that Apple, "Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the 'big four' music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI." (Jobs 1). I really think Jobs was smart for doing this as it makes the step for consumers switching to Itunes from CD purchases much easier for the big four. While this was largely political and I don't really agree with it, sometimes you need politics sadly as in this case. If Apple hadn't had DRM I think they might have ran into more problems with their Itunes store and possibly the concept might not have even got through. In other words it was a baby step towards what we see with EMI and their introduction of copyright free songs.

If anybody has noticed I think highly of the whole Apple store thing and I again applaud EMI for their introduction of copyright free songs. It is sad that the Beatles, who have already made insane amounts of money in their lifetime are one of the few groups to not allow this. I really don't think this will decrease record companies or recording artists' profits and they just need to learn to have a little faith in the everyday consumer.

I had to end with the quote that Jack Valenti said of the VCR, of which I compare to the current situation with copyrighted music, "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." (Wikipedia). Also note that if you read Wikipedia's article on Jack Valenti after the quote they state that shortly after he stated this (in 1982) the home video industry became the mainstay of movie studio revenues in the 80s. I can give Jack a little credit however with his quote in the PC World article, "If I go down to the hardware store and buy an electric lawn mower and I take it home, and three weeks later my wife runs over it in the driveway, I can't take it back and get a new one. I can't get a backup." (Valenti). That makes a lot of sense but I still feel that these are entirely different industries.

So would there be a difference with the video industry than with the music industry?