MattCreamer.com

A quick look at my record collection suggests I probably have about 500 CDs that are burned version of discs that friends bought, copied between 1992 (when I started listening to music) and 2004 (when I stopped buying CDs). I’d guess I’ve probably copied 500 of my own purchases for other people over that same time frame. None of these copies were sold or bought and the copying was not a substitute for buying music. In fact, it turned me on to acts I probably wouldn’t have heard otherwise. I ended replacing a ripped version of Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” with a store-bought one just because I wanted the art work.  You’d also probably find some illegal music downloads on my hard drive, along with thousands of legitimate ones from iTunes and eMusic. I also have dozens of books borrowed or bought from used-book stores, video-cassette dubs of favorite movies, and, in college, it was routine for professors to distribute photocopied excerpts from book so we didn’t have to buy the entire tomes.

Should I–both a buyer and thief of media–be held liable?

A ridiculous civil verdict in Minneapolis would have you believe so. A mother of two being sued by the record industry for copyright infringement was found liable for $220,000–or over $9,000 for each of the 24 works she uploaded to a file-sharing service. One of which was Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin;” another was a Green Day track.

As a writer, I earn my living on copyright protection and I feel strongly that it should exist. But to be absolutist and litigious about it is the wrong tack in this day and age. It’s been a long time since you could predict and control the afterlife of a purchased book or record. It’s been long safe to assume that passalong of copyrighted materials will occur. The Internet will certainly increase the velocity at which that occurs and record labels and artists should be concerned. But this isn’t the way to do express that concern.

We saw the right tack earlier this week in Radiohead’s appeal to its fans to pay-what-they-will. It’s certainly not the only answer, but it is one that appeals to the hearts and minds rather than to lawsuit-inspired fear. The RIAA and, more importantly, musical acts should be educating consumers about the risks to artists and coming up with alternative business models and, perhaps, more realistic pricing of its products, not suing them.