Don’t Play Your Records For Your Friends
A Cornell University student who received a letter from the RIAA and went on to accept their $3000 settlement offer in lieu of further action offered this comment:
“I think this country has gotten completely out of control with personal property rights,” she said. “Music, art and literature should be about sharing an experience with as many people as possible. I think that real artists and inventors should be content to know that their music is so widely appreciated and admired. It has also been shown that music downloading and sampling has helped the music industry because people are able to test and try music before buying it. Music sharing is hardly a serious crime.”
(quoted in the Cornell Daily Sun)
In that statement I think I finally see the crux of the political dispute over file sharing. To this student – and apparently to thousands of others – the computer and the internet are social communication tools. To these people, sharing files over the internet is conceptually the same thing as a group of friends sitting around a dorm room playing cd’s for each other. Imagine the degree of offense that you would feel if the government or a record company tried to control how many people you could have in your living room when you played your records? The outrage would be enormous, and the level of non-compliance would be just as enormous.
That’s the same reaction that many people, particularly younger people, have to the limitations on music file sharing. I don’t know, maybe computer file sharing really is the new living room.
October 9th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
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