"Tin earred, graph-paper brained accounts
Instead of music fans
Call all the shots at giant record companies now
The lowest common denominator rule.
Forget honesty, forget creativity
The dumbest by the mostest that's the name of the game
But sales are slumping
And no one will say why
Could it be they put out one too many lousy records?"
- MTV Get Off the Air (Dead Kennedys)
Now that that's out of the way, really, the woman was involved in theft of intellectual property. There are some grey areas for me in song sharing - mainly deletes, if I owned your 7" in 1986 and it was never released on CD (or 500 copies were pressed before it was deleted), I don't think your music should disappear. Case in point -
Death Sentence. Someone finally bought out the rights to their albums, and there have been plans for about 5 years to rerelease on CD. And still nothing.
If the songs are readily available for purchase, and in her case - they are (without going into her taste in music... gah!) it's not so grey.
I'd much rather the RIAA go after those actually
breaking the laws than piling all this DRM/rootkit stuff onto those of us who actually buy music and just want legal copies for our cars/garages.
That's my opinion on it.
Bren R.
