Is the RIAA a threat to national security? John Dvorak thinks so. Read:
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) may become indirectly responsible for our inability to stop the next terrorist attack on the US. Hear me out on this one. The association's recent move to bust individuals, mostly students, for music trading will spark a movement toward anonymous computing unlike anything we've ever seen. Already two anonymous music swapping systems have appeared: Filetopia and Blubster. This is just the beginning.
We can expect to see the development of new stealth technologies that will be used routinely by everyone. A massive trend toward true Net anonymity will have repercussions that are all bad. Child porn rings will be harder to uncover. E-mail sources will be harder to find. Spam will rule. Virus coders will remain in the shadows. Terrorism can flourish in such an environment. And the RIAA still won't win the battle over file swapping. But it will have set off a bad chain of events.
As always, I find Dvorak's worries a little overblown. But let's not forget that it isn't just Congress that forgets about the Law of Unintended Consequences.
The RIAA is just stupid. They're missing huge opportunities to boost their business, and instead directly attacking their customers and the technology that is used to distribute their music. I wish them a swift and embarassing collapse.
Hey idiots, try ANY of the following...
1. Switch to DVD format. Makes the discs harder to copy and the needed equipment more expensive and less accessable.
2. Increase sound quality or add digital info like lyrics and therefore file size. Even with broadband, how many songs could I trade if .mp3s were all 30+ megs?
3. Do what the movie companies have figured out...put cool extra content on music discs like videos or interviews or exclusive passworded web links so people actually have a reason to buy them.
4. Accept the fact that the industry is changing. There can not, by definition, be another Elvis or Beatles. Record companies and radio can no longer control when and what music we hear. The pop music industry is maturing, so maybe it's time to concentrate on the music instead of the hype.
Dvorak's not over the top this time. Do a little searching on the NSA and the unintended effects of their Clipper and Skipjack initiatives in spreading crytographic knowledge and software around the world in the early 1990s. And P2P has millions of dedicated users, which crypto didn't and still doesn't.
