Copyright Madness

I don't even know where to begin. Here we are, in 2012, having discussions about copyright that are the biggest nit picking ever of how users want to consume media. Can you imagine if in 1980 the MPAA was able to follow you down the street with you carrying your boombox and charge you each time you played a song that was on that mix cassette tape, just because you recorded songs from the radio?

I got my first home computer in 1994, and Internet Access came shortly after. I remember the AOL chat rooms like it was yesterday. It was nothing more than a text box of scrolling text, but what made it amazing to me was that you could type in certain commands, and the chat room would do things like scroll a bunch of text, or mock users, or, my favorite, play a .wav file that everyone could hear (if they had the .wav file on their computer.). .Wav files were entirely too large to store an entire song, so most of them were just clips of either music, or little short ditties, or movie quotes. I think I still have a DVD around here somewhere with some of those.

 At the time that we were sharing those .wav files, we had discussions about copyright, but always came back to fair use, since we never used full songs or movies. The clips were always 10 or less seconds. Then, of course, the .mp3 was born, as was P2P file sharing.

At this point, Hollywood and the music creators had no input, no stance, nothing to say about copyright violations. I remember emailing a couple of the artists way back then, and never got a response from them. That was the true wild west of the Internet. We all ripped our CD's and stuffed em in our folder to share up to the world. A part of us were thinking "You Bastards charged me for the full record, the 2 song record, the cassette tape, the 2 song cassette tape, and the CD. Hell yea I'm gonna download the electronic one for free. I paid you 5x already for the same song!".

Now, let's jump forward 18 years. Hard drives have gotten larger. .Wav files have passed away and allowed other file formats to take the spotlight that can store the entire song in the same size as the 10 second clips. Online streaming is slowly becoming the preferred method of consuming media, as users really don't want to have to deal with keeping up with all those files (I know I don't). We just want to be able to access a specific song, on whatever device we have with us at the time, during any time of the day. This leads us up to where we are today.

Copyrights holders VS The Consumer

Maybe it was unfair to the artists that we spent the first few years of being online sharing up all of our songs to each other. We were just a bunch of pissed off customers that were tired of being forced to pay for the same thing over and over and over each time a new format came out. We were tired of having to pay for an entire album in which we only liked one song. We also didn't have ANY choices for purchasing songs from the artists that would play on our computers. There was no iTunes store, no Pandora, no Amazon. Even in 2012, it's still difficult to find some of the more obscure music in electronic format. It's getting better, we are offered up more choices than we were in the past.

The biggest issue is that 'fine line' between fair use and copyright infringement. Some of the copyright maximalists demand that you pay for each time you hear or play a song. Some demand you pay a higher price based on where you are physically at when the song is played. The consumer just wants to pay for the product, and use it however they please. I am just baffled that Copyright holders are trying to pass so many different laws to try to get back to where the consumer has to pay multiple times for the same product.

The software industry can get away with it, because those yearly subscription fees also grant a user the ability to get updates. A song doesn't have an update. There are no new features added to the song. Those should be a one time purchase, and done. Yet, the copyright holders get lawyers involved in individual cases to try to nail down the consumer into supporting the old business model of paying multiple times for the same thing.

To the consumer, it's easy. If I have paid for the song, it shouldn't matter what I do with it, as long as I am not making any money from playing the song. Any non-business related playing of the song is nothing more than free advertising for the artist. To the copyright holder, they just want to be able to put in minimal effort for maximum return, and to be able to charge multiple times for the same product. There has to be a happy medium in there for both sides.