*All monetary values expressed in this post are in US Dollars.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_tec_music_downloadingWhat's everyone's opinion on this case, the RIAA's actions, and the severity of the outcome? I'm interested in seeing what others have to say so I can further my own psychological development with respect to issues of copyright, artist interest, and justice.
I've done a lot of soul searching, theorizing, pondering and investigating regarding copyright matters recently (as I'm sure the whole Chrono fan community has to a greater or lesser extent, for obvious reasons). Clearly all intellectual property holders incur real harm when someone distributes songs currently on the market for free without paying the IP holders a royalty for each song consumed -- I imagine legal free audio-listening sites like Rhapsody.com and various Internet radio sites operate by paying the IP holders some average amount, in contrast to what the student on trial in this case did (straight-up free P2P sharing).
Before examining situational nuances that could be brought into the picture in the context of this case, I'd like to observe that the economic rationale on which cases like this are predicated may be significantly flawed. I imagine the RIAA, by singling out this one offender and punishing him to a gigantic degree, is attempting to deter his fellows from engaging in P2P file sharing of copyrighted works (I'm sure host file distribution like Rapidshare and Sendspace are only a few months or years away from the grasp of lawyers, so the method of sharing might not make a difference in the long run). However, Tenenbaum is still one of two high profile cases this year I can recall in a sea of what, 10 million? 50 million? One billion offenders?
The typical rational economic model of risk going around in Economics textbooks these days posits that your typical dude or dudette will essentially multiply the cost of an activity by the probability of occurrence, and then compare the resulting "expected cost" of the action to alternatives. If the $675,000 judgment against Tenenbaum fully holds, and he was one of 10 million peers -- maybe a conservative estimate -- the expected cost to any one peer is ($675k) * (1/10,000,000) or roughly 6.8 cents per infringement. The problem here is that a typical song will cost between 99 cents and $2.00 in most cases. Clearly, if you buy into the economic models the Chicago School and others are engraining into Econ undergrads' heads nowadays, the appropriate option for offenders is to *gasp* continue their P2P activities full scale! To the RIAA's credit, the expected cost of each infringement rises significantly if you factor in the $1.92 million judgment against the other lady that happened recently, and any others punished notably within the past few years. Whether it rises to the market value of the average song may still be debatable, however.
Not that I really buy into what Econ textbooks say on numerous issues, including this one. I'd put far more weight on the sheer probability of being caught than a formula we all supposedly implicitly carry out before embarking on some activity. IMHO the RIAA might be far better served by asking for a judgment of approximately the fair market value of the songs while pushing the probability of detection closer to 100%, which should be fairly doable with the current infrastructure. However, I'm not really familiar enough with traditional pirating techniques to know if some roadblock exists that prevents the RIAA from just having unpaid Interns run Internet searches and catching pirates by the hundreds in a given afternoon, so I could be wrong. Likewise, there may be something in national copyright law that sets a minimum punishment per infringement, essentially robbing the RIAA the opportunity to pursue more efficient and reasonable actions.
A closely related issue is preventing P2P sharing for copyright's sake, and not for profit's sake. What I mean by this is, say a piece of music still falls under copyright but the piece of music is no longer being sold except as a rarity in second-hand markets. The profit interest to the artist and copyright holder is essentially nonexistent (only the second-hand holder of the copy profits,
an issue which itself has been subject to lawsuit from time to time!).
The First Sale Doctrine still standing, however (and hopefully forever), the letter of the law and the artist's profit interest do not necessarily coincide. I think an argument can be made for file sharing on the basis of art preservation in cases when First Sale becomes impossible -- original work "out of print," deleted from First Sellers' databases to make space on servers, what have you. This is the rationale on which I have no problem whatsoever seeking out a classic NES or SNES videogame and storing it on my hard drive; I'm not entirely trusting of game companies to preserve the artifacts of great gaming as if they were scrupulous museums. Admittedly, the practice of re-releasing old games muddies the art preservation rationale by making First Sale possible again -- in the cases of certain lucky titles.
Long post is Long, so I think I'll cut it short here. I'd eventually like to get to Fair Use (which, unlike the art preservation rationale, is codified in most developed countries' copyright law if I'm not mistaken -- which I could very well be) with respect to things like usage of copyrighted works in mixed content Youtube videos, and finally culminating in the situation
Crimson Echoes and other fan works have become embroiled in from time to time.
