2004-05-07
Please, I'm begging you, get Sen. Orrin Hatch out of office as soon as possible. This man is completely out of touch with reality. He's already introduced a bill that exempts the music industry for antitrust suits so that they can dictate royalties on music downloads without fear of repercussions and now he's trying to pile more crap on this bill.
Hatch wants to strengthen the EnFORCE Act to give the record companies more power to dictate royalties on "innovative forms of physical phonorecords, like enhanced compact disks and DVD audio disks". Specifically they want to start releasing double-sided CDs where one side is a normal audio CD and the other side is an SACD or DVD-audio. And guess what? They want to charge separate royalties for each format on the disc. So, either the distributers have to be willing to take a cut in their profit margin to sell these products, or they'll have to charge you as much for the dual-format version as you would pay to buy the two versions separately.
Now I understand that the record labels want to make as much money as they can get, but why is the government promoting monopolistic practices? You would think that with all the uproar over the corporate corruption cases and the Microsoft antitrust suits that people would take notice of the fact that we have senators pushing through legislation that "will expand an existing antitrust exemption." Capitalism thrives on competition. Once you eliminate the competition it hurts consumers.
On a weird note this quote is also in Hatch's statement (emphasis added):
The bill also requires the Department of Justice to report to Congress detailed information about the scope of its efforts to investigate and prosecute crimes involving the sexual exploitation of minors or intellectual property.
Zuh?!?!? I mean how do you sexually exploit intellectual property? Ok, that was dumb. Honestly though, this is the only time he talks about sexual exploitation of minors so it seems fairly blatant that it was just thrown in as a way to make the bill more palatable. How can you oppose a bill that's trying to strengthen prosecution of crimes involving the sexual exploitation of minors?
If you couldn't tell I'm pretty frustrated with the state of the music industry. Here are some useful links for avoiding the RIAA.
- RIAA Radar
- Search for artists or albums to see if they're distributed by the RIAA
- Boycott RIAA
- Guess.
- eMusic
- Subscription-based music download service. All songs are standard MP3s, no DRM, and they're from independent labels. The :30 previews of songs are available without a subscription, or you can get a free trial period to check it out.
- Epitonic
- Download or stream select full tracks from a variety of (generally) independent musicians.
- Creative Commons
- Some Rights Reserved. Copyright licenses which support the sharing of ideas.
Categories: Music
