The RIAA makes me sure there’s another fundemental law of physics out there to be discovered. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction - except in the case of the RIAA, when the reaction is opposite and greater. Leaving aside the commercial questionability of attempting to alienate every last one of your customers by suing the pants off them for operating a search engine, it seems that every move the RIAA makes is followed by some geek cobbling together a counter-move. Start trawling the web with a search spider looking for *.mp3 and it’s matter of minutes before someone builds a tarpit for the RIAA spider and sues them for trespass. Start trawling the file sharing networks looking for the IP addresses of sharers, and they disappear behind proxies and into closed networks.
The latest is this idea of how to legally infuriate the RIAA by subverting their webcasting royalty terms to create a network of one-on-one web radio broadcasters, thinly disguising the fact that it’s basically a novel way of file sharing. But this time, it’s perfectly legal.
The basic problem that the RIAA has is that it’s staffed by and takes its lead from the lawyers. While I’m sure they’re the finest that money can buy in terms of their legal knowledge and know-how, their ability to read the likely reactions of the filesharing public at large seems questionable at best. It’s like squeezing a balloon - every handful that’s compressed pops out the other side. Or possibly like chasing soap in the shower - the harder you squeeze, the further across the bathroom the soap flies from your grasp. And if there are other soap-in-showers metaphors that come to mind, well, they’re probably equally applicable here.
So it is with chasing down the filesharers with legal or technical means. For every smart lawyer in LA, there’s a hundred geeks with the knowledge and the inclination to respond to the latest legal move by exploiting the open nature of the internet and the web to work around whatever manoevure the music business is trying to make. If the RIAA had had the foresight to see the opportunities, precious little of this would have happened - but their response was pure “fight or flight”, with the result that they’ve been dragged into a fight which it’s very difficult to see them winning without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. As concepts like fair use are whittled away in an attempt to slam the file sharing stable door shut, legalistic overkill becomes more and more commonplace. Instead of affecting only the perpetrators of the acts that the RIAA is attempting to stop, it starts to affect everyone in ways that noone could have anticipated. Using the DCMA to shut down the market for non-branded inkjet cartridges for example - or preventing future generations from being able to read obscelescent file formats by nailing them legally shut.
There seems to be a vicious circle developing of ever more reactionary attempts to prop up a business model that’s being rendered irrelevant by technological progress. The problem for bodies like the RIAA is that they’re being drawn into a legal and technical arms race that they’re ill-equipped to win.
