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The world is currently full of people who just can’t take the blame when they’re clearly wrong. The government is full of conspiracies, as well as major corporations. Who’s to blame for this? I’d say capitalism, bringing out the real greed in humans, which is why people must fight to prevent greed within our country, as there’s no other option to capitalism at the moment. Currently, some of the real wrong-doers are the employees of the RIAA (or Recording Industry Association of America) and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America). They are terrible people.

The Recording Industry Association’s website states the following:

“No black flags with skull and crossbones, no cutlasses, cannons, or daggers identify today’s pirates. You can’t see them coming; there’s no warning shot across your bow. Yet rest assured the pirates are out there because today there is plenty of gold (and platinum and diamonds) to be had. Today’s pirates operate not on the high seas but on the internet. The pirate’s credo is still the same — why pay for it when it’s so easy to steal?”

Yarrrr. The recording industry needs to grow up. They need to move with the times, much like other companies are doing. iTunes, which most computer competent people are familiar with, is successfully battling the Pirates of America by offering fair prices for music. Fair being not a excessive profit, but not necessarily what it should be. The recording industries response to this is to raise prices of their CD’s, in order to insure that their profit margins remain the same, regardless of the fact that they already make a ridiculous amount.

On November 2, 2005, a 67-year-old grandpa was sued because a 12-year-old grandson downloaded 4 movies onto his computer via i-mesh. The man refused a $4,000 settlement offer, thus landing him in court for nearly $600,000 dollars in damages. He claims that he didn’t know, and that his grandson didn’t know, it was illegal. He also mentioned that they already owned three of the four movies he downloaded. He also simply could not pay the $4,000 since he was retired and thus on a fixed income. The Motion Picture Association of America didn’t care. And America’s supposed to have a positive connotation! They should change their company’s mission statement: “We, the people of the MPAA, believe in financially raping any and all people that come into contact with our data on the internet, regardless of logic”. The ends of these cases are usually not publicized because there are so many of them, so we may never know what happens to this poor old man.

As of November 1, the first trial and conviction of a BitTorrent user took place in Hong Kong. BitTorrent is the most commonly used peer-to-peer application for large files. The trial successfully caused the amount of seeders, or people sharing the completed file, from Hong Kong to drop 80%, but that doesn’t really matter because of the nature of BitTorrent. While you download, you are always uploading. Whatever you have, you upload, so even though you’re not registered as seeding the file, bits (literally), are always being uploaded. This is a very important detail, because the verdict of the court case cannot be applied to an uploader that’s continuously downloading the same file.

File sharers are not the only ones against the RIAA. A new record label, called Magnatune, has the slogan “We are not evil.” Magnatune realizes the three major reasons file sharers share. First off, Magnatune understands that the musicians hate how an artist gets less than a dollar per CD sold by any other record label, namely the major top four. They also realize the file-sharers reason for sharing: the useless, unjustified lawsuits brought on by the recording industry. Lastly, they understand that DRM (Digital Rights Management) has gotten out of hand. To prevent the uploading, the Recoding Industry has made it damn near impossible to extract a CD onto ones own computer, which is a completely legal move. To rectify this, Magnatune’s creating a new way of doing business. Currently signing very few artists, they sell digital versions of CD’s, of many formats, for a price you name after listening to it. The lowest you can buy it for is 5 dollars, which is still about a quarter of the price of a store-bought CD. To solve the three major problems, they give the artist 50% of whatever the CD sells for, so even if the CD sells for the cheapest, the artist is making over 100% more per CD sale than he or she would with another company. To solve the last two problems, Magnatune releases the MP3, WAV, or FLAC files to you free of any DRM coding and free to put on as many media player devices as one would like.

If a cheap and legitimate solution to the file sharing problem is created, much like Magnatune, p2p will probably drop considerably, but it will never stop completely. Friends will always copy CDs for other friends, or share their favorite music over the AIM transfer interface. Such is life, and everyone in the world can’t be sued. The Recording Industry must find a way to work with the problem rather than kill it, much like they once had to do for the VCR, tape recorders, and other things of that nature. Peer on.