Hanging out with an old friend over the weekend way outside the Beltway, he was asking me about copyright, and told me that the RIAA was coming out with a theory that copying music from CD’s that one owns to an iPod was now a target. I found that hard to imagine–it didn’t sound like an issue that RIAA would find it worthwhile to pursue, and indeed they’ve argued against liability in such a case on a few occasions (once on the theory that a license to do so was implied). And, indeed, the Washington Post has now pulled the story.
That such a rumor would spread points to deeper problems with press coverage of the music industry’s problems as a whole. Advocates have created an image of aggressive copyright holders proceeding without regard to their own long run interests in their own audience. By and large, journalists have bought into this. That the music industry and consumers have a *real* problem to solve–the difficulty of creating new business models without enforceable boundaries to keep out free riders en masse (not every single one)–has been neglected. That it is simply not plausible that an entire economic sector has mysteriously been populated by mean, short-sighted people is likewise ignored. Alas, some of us on the free-market side have bought into this, folks who one would expect to think in terms of the big picture and the long run, not personalities. Ah well.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.