Chaos Magnet

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has good guide on How not to get sued by the RIAA for file sharing. I'm torn on this. On the one hand, I think the RIAA is insane for trying to sue random people, including parents, grandparents, and roommates of actual file sharers. They're trying to make examples of people in the hopes of scaring other people into stopping, and it's working. It told my son this morning that when he gets his computer back -- it's finally given up the ghost, I think -- Kazaa comes off and stays off.

On the other hand, I'm a bit disappointed in how this whole file-sharing thing has gone. I mean, when I found Napster, I thought it was terrific. I downloaded all kinds of music I never would have bought sound-unheard -- and then I bought some of it. And the stuff I bought was not your usual top-40 stuff, but some ska CD's and Southern Culture On the Skids and the like. I could really look at it and say, "Hey, this is helping you, and it's particularly helping artists who can't afford millions in publicity."

But I think that's because I'm a little older than your typical file sharer. When I told my son he had to give up file sharing, he said, "Then where am I going to get my music?" It never occured to him to actually buy it. It doesn't seem to occur to most people to just buy it. We've raised a generation that figures whatever they want is free for the taking as long as somebody on the Internet has it.

Maybe I'm just a little bit sensitised to the issue because I frequently get letters from people who've bought one of my books in Iran asking for help. Now, I have nothing against Iran, and I certainly have nothing against my readers, but there's one problem: there IS no authorized translation of my books in Iran. I didn't get paid for those books. There's no copyright law there, so someone picked up a copy, paid some translator a little bit of cash, and now they're making money off my work and I'm left only with the labor of cleaning up after them.

But I digress. Bands who want to distribute their music should be able to do that. The RIAA shouldn't be able to strong-arm technology companies into crippling our computers to prevent that. But because somewhere along the line we as a whole lost our impulse to Do The Right Thing, we're all paying the price.