This article at NYTimes discusses some of the anti-piracy measures currently being explored by the recording industry. While nothing has formally been enacted due to concerns of legality, some of the proposed measures they are looking into include "freeze"-- a program designed to freeze your computer for some specified amount of time, and "silence"-- a program which roots out and deletes all illegal music on your system.

While reading the article, I couldn't help but draw some parallels to our war in Iraq and the war over piracy. With Iraq, you had a vicious regime lording over its people through fear and intimidation. Obviously, with the recording industry you have the same situation between the recording companies and the artists. Likewise, the recording artists are probably as skittish to losing all their rights and control over the music through music swapping as the Iraqi citizenry are to welcoming the American army to come in and "rebuild" their country.

This leaves the rather dubious parallel between the the similarities of the U.S. army and the peer to peer music swapping applications. However, this parallel is regime change. The technological prowess of U.S. forces is the equivalent to the unstoppable nature of peer to peer file sharing. If history does repeat itself, then the music industry should be very worried. P2P is destroying the recording industries ability to profit from the artists they control and at the same time the internet is the oil which might give the artists the resources they need to determine their own fate.

I guess ironically in both cases the American people are just the consumers-- consumers of oil and consumers of music. Rights? Tyranny? What's that all about? Fatten us up, lower our gas prices and drop the price of CDs and we'll be happy.

By Gary at 03:58 PM in Rights | Comments (0)