[advocacy] Trading of 'pirated' music online is wider than ever (my quotes)

[Krishna E. Bera]

> > I think this makes my point about the need for a rational approach to 
> > non-commercial music sharing. The RIAA can't sue every one of 15 
> > million people.
> 
> I bet their Washington lobbyists will eventually propose legislation
> enabling a new form of lawsuit, which one might call "reverse
> class-action". In this type of suit, a well-defined entity sues an
> entire class of people, each of whom must pay a fraction of any
> penalties or settlements. :-)

We already have this, in Canada anyway, and worse - 
the public has been judged guilty /a priori/ and extra-judicially.
There is a small surcharge added to the cost of blank tapes and CDs,
that is supposed to go to authors and musicians.  I think some of the
fee goes to government Arts grants, but it's just not the same as if
they were to set up an infrastructure where artists could publish
cheaply and actually make a living independently thru fan sales.

> The thing that the RIAA always wants you to ignore is that a lot of this
> illicit downloading is just people wanting to hear music before they
> decide whether or not to buy it. This week, I bought three CDs because
> of this that I probably wouldn't have bought otherwise. And I have a
> couple more that I plan to buy when I go to the music store next week.
> So that's five CDs that will have been bought by one person within a
> period of two weeks _because_of_ Internet file sharing.

If you havent heard it yet, there's a section in RMS's talk on Copyright 
and Globalization on how music should be copyrighted and artists could 
make a decent living based on such listener appreciation and purchasing.  
Transcript at
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.html
and Ogg file at 
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/audio/audio.html#MIT2001

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