It’s not that I think copyrights are meaningless or that those who illegally share music/movies/etc are innocent victims… But this kind of thing makes me sick:
RIAA file-sharing suit focuses on Internet2
405 students at 18 of our leading educational institutions are being sued by the RIAA this week. What has happened to our country? This is not how we should be treating our best and brightest.
Maybe these guys aren’t innocent victims, but I don’t think of them as criminals either. They’re just too impatient to wait for society and industry to catch up to technology. There is no reason that I should pay a record company $1 to copy a file from a friend’s computer to mine. The $1 price tag sounds fine in advertising and when you’re talking about a one-time purchase. But ask any college student how much music they have on their computer or mp3 player. The numbers are staggering. I know people who have 30,000 tracks on their hard drives. Hell, Apple advertises how many tens of thousands of songs their iPod can hold. But if the RIAA had their way, that 30,000 tracks would cost $30,000! Scratch that, the RIAA wants to raise the price of music tracks to as much as $3 per song!?! Their logic is this: Apparently lots of people are willing to pay $2.50 for ringtones – so they should be willing to pay more for the whole track.
That kind of thinking needs to stop. It doesn’t cost the RIAA anything to let me download two tracks instead of one. When people buy ringtones, they probably don’t buy in bulk. They probably buy one, and maybe a new one a few months later. They’re content to pay $5-$10 a year for ringtones (and these are mostly kids who aren’t doing the paying anyway).
I’ve talked about this before: As the cost of delivery drops (it was cheap, now it’s virtually free), the expectation for volume increases proportionally. If you ask someone whether they’re willing to pay $5 a month for music (in any form, be it CDs, downloads, etc), they’ll probably say “sure.” You could probably get most people to pay $10, or $15, heck maybe $20. In the past, that would mean 10-20 CDs per year. That might be a good average; in fact it’s probably a little high.
These students don’t want to get their music for nothing. They’re perfectly happy spending $15 a month on CDs. But they see how easy it is to transfer music electronically. They see the huge amount of music floating around. They want more of it.
This is why I’m kind of partial to the subscription model. For a reasonable monthly fee, I should have unlimited access to all the music I want. But there are problems here:
1) I don’t want to have to get all of that music from one place.
2) I don’t want DRM or other artificial restrictions on the content UNLESS is allows 3)
3) I want to be able to exchange content freely with other “music” subscribers.
Basically, we want the same thing we had with Napster 1.0. But we want it to be legal.
Give us Napster (the old one), require an account to login, and charge us $15/month to access it. Have some record industry servers sharing stuff, but let US share whatever we want. Track download counts somewhere and reward the appropriate record label and artists proportionally. Offer premium services where we can pay more to get access to “bonus” content (early releases, behind-the-scenes looks, B-sides, etc). Most important, though: No DRM. Or vastly better (more open) DRM. I’m starting to think that the current DRM models just aren’t going to work.