http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7283RIAA's attempt to hold ISPs to account is risible
Hilary Rosen's Bright Idea
By Jack Russell: Sunday 19 January 2003, 09:59
HILARY ROSEN -- Jack Valenti's RIAA female clone -- has now gone on record saying that as part of the fight against music piracy, ISPs should be held accountable for the actions of their users and charged a fee for giving their customer's access to services such as Kazaa or Morpheus.
The result of holding ISPs liable for the ways their customers use them would be catastrophic. Should ISPs be held accountable for the actions of pedophiles? How about members of racist groups? How about groups that are legal but we wish weren't, like the KKK, Aryan Nation, and the American Polka Dancing Society?
While ISPs are held accountable for removing illegal materials when detected, the idea that they should be held accountable for what their users might do is ridiculous.
It's astonishing that after so many months the RIAA continues to ignore what its consumers have been screaming in its face. We don't see the recording industry moving to address problems of overwhelming same-ness in music, high CD prices, or low artist compensation.
Even their competing download services are a joke, with draconian requirements, high fees, and ? my favorite ? the ability to delete your music in the event you stop paying for the monthly service. Did I mention you can't burn any of your music library either? What a joke.
If the RIAA had been thinking during the Napster battle they'd have swallowed their pride and cut a deal with the service (which was, after all, owned by a music company), whose downloads they could monitor and whose users could be tracked.
While they were busy grinding the life out of Napster, however, its evolving successors took shape, minus the technical and legal flaws that had brought Napster's downfall. Now the RIAA is preparing to take on Kazaa -- a much more complicated process, given that company's foreign status. But even as they do, a new generation of file serving technology is doubtlessly under construction ? one deemed at making its users even harder to trace or discover.
Promoting copyright restrictions and digital rights management technology is not going to solve the music industry's problem. From a technological standpoint it's unfeasible?there will always be a way to intercept the output from a stereo system and redirect it for copying purposes. Such methods can be made more difficult and time consuming, but they cannot be completely eradicated.
Even if the RIAA could choke off unlicensed sound completely, it still has a bigger problem to face in the dissatisfaction of its customers. Somewhere along the line, the music industry has decided it can control how consumers listen to music without consulting them. You can't bludgeon people to obey rules they've already decided violate their principles of fair use and in this day and age you can't keep them from doing something about it. It's time for the RIAA to either face and accept that fact or get used to seeing a lot of red ink.
