January 25th, 2004

I saw a girl on Friday that I really liked. lol, were you ever to look up the definition of “numpty” it would read “NXSeal on Friday, the 23rd of January 2004”. lol, seriously I felt blearh about myself afterwards, and what I should of, shouldn’t of done.

Apart from that, I was thinking of the validity of copyright laws in our present day, and how the RIAA misuses it. Namely, the use of P2P. I mean, a library pays for a book once. Then people go
out and read the book, without violating copyright laws. A video rental store buys VHS/DVDs once, and then people rent them for a fee to the store’s profit. Now someone buys a CD, and a bunch of people on the internet borrow it, and it becomes considered copyright infringement. How does that work?!

I could think that maybe because they copied it, it would constitute a violation of “copy”-rights. Yet these are new times, and what was once defined as copying has become an antiquated
beast in our new times of computers, where the only way of transporting media is by “copying”.

Reguardless, I still think the RIAA is a little snitch:

  • CD sales have increased 8% over the last year. This might be actually attributed to P2P, since more people may now “taste-test” new bands, which was otherwise prohibited through the very cost of the CDs [no one wants to spend $30 on a CD that could be crap].
  • This reguardless that the RIAA has artificially kept the cost of CDs at an extreme high, even though the price of producing the media has dwindelled in the last decade.
  • This reguardless that teens are switching to other forms of entertainment which bring them more bang for their buck (ie. a 2Hour DVD movie on average costs noticeably less than a 45Minute CD, even though the movie itself cost millions upon millions to produce, quite unlike the CD; or video games which bring much more bang for your buck).
  • This reguardless that “legal” P2P systems that pay insanely large royalties to the RIAA have taken hold of the market as a viable form of new media distribution.
  • This reguardless that the RIAA has decided to go after their very fans to rake in more cash, instead of trying to understand why the whole P2P phenomena occured and trying to harness its might into profits. Maybe all those people got turned off for a reason, like being unable to afford the large ripoffs that has become music CDs.

The only argument for the RIAA now is that the sales of the  reintroduced singles format fell by 30% over the last year. Not surprising considering they were charging $7 for one song
and a few abyssimal remixes of that same song. Also not surprising since such reintroductions often fail. But of course, when CNN airs its so-called unbiased news on piracy, they’ll only single in on this misinforming fact, and have some loner teen/adult with half a brain defending the cause of P2P.

Next time: Ignorance and the cost of general copyright defenitions pertaining to the development of software.