“I say share and scam all the music you like, as most musicians make the large sum of their money from concert tours and merchandise sales.”

I understand your sentiment, honestly. I felt that way for a long time too – but it’s a position driven by anger and it works against all the important objectives, namely;

1) Freedom for real artists
2) Freedom for the audience
3) The destruction of the RIAA/MPAA mafias
4) Refutation of the myth that artists need the mafias for protection.

Some media is owned by the RIAA/MPAA, and let’s be honest, whatever scullduggery and underhand subterfuge they used to appropriate that property it was done legally and they have a proper claim to it. There’s no point fighting them on their own ground, they will win so long as we use the law. Fair use is dead.

But their poison wares are outnumbered 10:1 by media that they do not own. On the whole the quality of the majority media, the stuff owned by you and me, the real user submitted YouTube video, the songs on MySpace etc, the quality of that is lower. 90% of it is disposable culture, but 10% is of a quality to rival what the lables own. In other words there is as much quality public domain media about as there is quality media owned by the media mafias. And the desirability of that media is growing, people want authenticity and there is a backlash against plastic mass produced crap.

The problem is filtering it, and adding value by aggregation. The function of the record/film company in the 21st century is not to distribute or market, it is to add value by selectivity.

Our most important goal is not to take ownership of the old media by piracy, let it die. Our most important objective is to make the RIAA/MPAA and the old guard irrelevant, to exclude them from the new culture so that fresh works do not become infected.

We should treat copyrighted material owned by the mafias as a cancer. It infects every database and FTP site it touches. That’s why I feel that the fingerprinting software offered by Philips is very useful and empowering to the independent scene, it gives us a way of removing the infected material – hopefully at the expense of the mafias themselves.

Objective (4) is the hardest to achieve. Most authentic artists do not work for money anyway, and Creative Commons offers everything they need to legally protect work while excluding the mafias from their aim of misappropriating it. There may be some leakage if greedy artists “sell out”, but I think the current generation is sufficiently well educated to know the Devil now.

Objective (3) will happen slowly with time. The mafias have enough rope to hang themselves with now and will hopefully be suffocate
in their own legal detritus. Part of this process is the growing up of a generation who don’t remember old 20th Century music and the dying out of a generation who do.

Is that sad? Yes, in a way. It’s sad that so much wonderful music will be lost. But future generations will create more, better culture. In that way I have a bitter-sweet optimism.

As I like to say, the mafias may own the past, but we own the future.

But I haven’t downloaded anything ‘new’, ever. I grew up in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s and that is the era of music that I search for online. Classic rock, mostly. There’s tons of ‘Pre-RIAA’ stuff out there from bands that are no longer around. Alas, most of the stuff I have is from bands that no longer exist as they did when I grew up. Still, back then I don’t think the record companies were doing their artists justice in their pricing.

Hmm… Maybe I’ll send a small honorarium to the Hendrix estate…