Techie Dad Hosts an Exchange Student

After reading how a Minnesota woman was fined $1.9 million for downloading 24 songs I became morally outraged. Yes, downloading music that you did not purchase is not the right thing to do, but so is using vast financial and political influence to terrorize everyday Americans! Moreover, we have much more important things to worry about as a nation, especially in terms of our economic problems and political crises in unstable foreign nations. These things have been said before, however, they bear repeating because people continue to be opressed by what is ostensibly a ‘middleman’ lobbying organization that protects the public images of music executives and recording artists.

Firstly let me say that I personally don’t support getting stuff you don’t pay for. If I like an album and often listen to it, I buy it. Artists deserve to get paid for their work even though this generally doesn’t happen through the release of one’s first album. What follows are ideas you can use to both show your support of musicians while at the same time telling the RIAA to go screw itself.

Support non-RIAA artists and buy non-RIAA albums

Why is this important? Mainly because this is the primary corporate powerhouse trying to screw people by price fixing (Ever seen one new CD sell for more than another or a DVD? How does that work?), hunting people online, and trying to assemble our nation’s lawmaking political will against LEGAL digital downloads.

Go to these sites for more information:
http://www.riaaradar.com
Tool to tell you which albums are backed buy the RIAA

http://www.boycott-riaa.com/

Buy Used CDs

This is a great legal way to get the music you want for less than half the price.
secondspin.com
half.ebay.com
Your local music store!

Use a private network to share

I am no legal scholar, but if I buy an album and rip it to my computer where my friends could play the file whenever no one else is using it, that would be called sharing. I should be allowed to share that music whenver I want. I believe iTunes has similar functionality built in already. but you could set up a Virtual Private Network to accomplish this on an ad hoc basis.

Share offline

Kick it old school. I’ve never used that phrase before, so I thought I would try it out. Make a mix CD, lend an album out. All of these things are the point of music anyway and it isn’t tied to your IP address.

Do not use Peer to Peer (P2P) services

There are a lot of legitimate uses for P2P networks, but in my mind the risk is just too great, especially where music is concerned. If you must trade files legitimately on the Internet, there are other ways to go about it that do not make use of this technology. The RIAA is spending millions of dollars trying to bulldoze the little guy and monetize every aspect of the album manufacturing process. They should be more concerned about the state of electronic media and distribution and how to put more value into the products they produce and unbundled media beyond 99 cents a song that actually make sense!

Use services like Pandora

Pandora is a great online muisc collection you can access (at this time) for free. Every artist I’ve ever searched for has come up. You can create custom music channels based on artists, genres or songs.

Tell your favorite artists you oppose the RIAA

OK- I’m not so sure how well this would work in actual practice, but for artists who are in touch with their fans, it couldn’t hurt? However, it seems to me that artists who have online communications with their fan base are probably doing independent types of things already.

For more information check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s page on file sharing and personal rights