Reply #39: What a great business plan...attack your very best potential customers. [View All]

[hunter]

This industry is fighting like a cornered animal.

I already do my best to stay out of the way and not touch any music or software that might get me in trouble.

It's really no big deal, since 95% of protected stuff is total crap anyways, and I can live without the rest quite comfortably.

I've already got the legal CD's of my coming of age music, and occasionally I'll find some more current musical gem I've missed in the used CD bins. But all my software these days is open source, and my favorite music is by artists who encourage their fans to share it for free or through venues in which most of the money goes directly to the artist -- often the artist's own web pages.

We've reached the place where the high quality production and distribution of music and software doesn't require the backing of large corporations, and we are very close to this level of technology with motion pictures.

Eventually people are going to start to wonder what institutions like the RIAA actually do other than harass people, and they are going to shy away from anything that stinks of these sorts of protection.

I don't have to support contributors to the RIAA or the Business Software Alliance when I've got places like these to hang out:

http://www.ubuntu.com

http://www.magnatune.com

http://www.archive.org

All of it thanks to organizations like the EFF that protect my right to refuse media controlled by big corporations.