So Orrin Hatch, the Utah Senator who is so in the pocket of the music and motion picture industries that he once suggested remotely destroying the computers of people suspected of pirating music is now head of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property.
How nice. Expect more restrictions on how you can use the music and movies you buy — a continued erosion of copyright at the expense of listeners and viewers.
And also expect piracy to increase, as more and more people to get stuff free.
Because that’s what happens when consumers realize they’re getting the shaft — they find ways around the system. That’s why P2P networks have grown so much and so fast.
And if the music or movie industries think they’ll come up with a technological solution to fix things, they’ve got their collective heads in the sand. Because every time — every time — some new scheme comes out to deny consumers their rights under current copyright law, some programmer finds a way around it.
Maybe it’s the instruction to “hold down the Shift key.” Or a small program you have to run. Or using a magic marker to draw on a CD. (These are all real examples.) Somehow, someone will find a way to break the copy protection scheme.
The operative phrase is “what the market will bear.” Clearly the market didn’t bear $15 CDs, because as soon as an alternative was available, people jumped. (That it happened to be a free alternative only helped, and that it happened to be an illegal alternative didn’t matter.)
The industry was incredibly slow to catch up, but now there are some low-cost alternatives such as iTunes and Napster (v.2.0). But these came after the free/illegal P2P infrastructure was in place, so it will take a lot to get people to move from that to a pay model.
This is especially true because of Hatch’s appointment. Having an unabashedly anti-consumer person in a position to make decisions about copyright might help the music and movie industries on paper, but in reality it will drive more and more folks to those free/illegal downloads.
Further, with Apple adding more restrictions to what you can do with the music you get from iTunes, the market is bearing less and less.
(Fun note: Some programmers, including Jon Johansen, the Norwegian who cracked DVD encryption, developed a program that lets you download iTunes music without restrictions. Yes, you still have to buy it, but the tunes that end up on your computer are restriction free — just like the music you get when you buy a CD.)
Sure, there will always be people who steal. But fewer people would be willing to “steal” music if they felt even a vague empathy for the recording industry. But the RIAA (the Recording Industry Assoc. of America) and its heavy-handed, sue-the-customer tactics hasn’t won friends. And having Orrin Hatch on their side doesn’t help — it hurts.
