 User's choice
I think about this issue quite a bit. I am a very avid music listener, and I strongly believe in supporting musicians. However, the reality of the situation is that it's up to the user to decide what fair use is for the vast majority of cases. Should I copy a cd for a friend? Should I make a compilation cd for a friend? Should I download music from non-pay sources? It's really up to me. Even the risk of downloading from non-pay sites can be mitigated (I think).
My personal rules have changed over time. Some years ago, I couldn't legally download a song or two from the web, but say I wanted to put Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl on a compilation cd. I didn't want to go buy a whole cd, but the option of paying $1 or so for a single download didn't exist, so I'd (with some guilt) download a song that I'd heard a million times on the radio. I like to listen to vast ranges of music types, and by downloading illegally I could try something out that I might later spend money on. Now I can use Rhapsody to legally try artists that are recommended one way or another and I probably spend more on music than I did before the digital explosion.
There are choices I've made that I'm less comfortable with. I let an exchange student staying with us load some of my old cds onto her mp3 player - theoretically the chances of both of us playing the song at the same time are slim, and theoretically we could swap the physical cd back and forth whenever one of us wants to hear a tune (until she returns to Slovakia), but realistically I have 2 copies of the same song without paying. I don't think I'll do that again.
I could go on here, the point is, unless I do something egregious it's my choice. There's some black, some white and a huge gray zone. I happen to care about the issue and try to be responsible, many do not. Those who succeed (and will succeed going forward) are those (like Steve) who understand that the world has changed and provide a business model that supports their customers' needs at a reasonable price. Successful business models are ones where people realize they have ceded certain levels of control to the user, monitor for egregious abuses, and specify clearly what THEY think are fair uses.
This is already too long so I'll leave off my rant about RIAA being the body driving so much of the control wars - they are primarily concerned about the labels and not about the artists, they don't understand technology, they don't understand their market and how it's shifting, they don't try to establish guidelines for fair use that recognize the user's power in the situation, etc etc etc etc.  |