Copyright

I've been following the #spectrial in Sweden where the datanörds from The Pirate Bay are up on charges of copyright infringement. Strike that, just making available the ability to commit copyright infringement, conspiracy to infringe copyright, or maybe just pissing in someone’s ear too many times. I am strangely fascinated by this case and I can’t figure out why. I don’t download every song I listen to or every movie I watch via torrents. These guys live in Sweden so it’s not like they’re my friends. However, I do download music and I think that’s what has caught my attention.

There seem to be some big and complex questions here: Should copyright laws even exist, is file “sharing” the equivalent of stealing, should the internets be “free”? I think it boils down to something much simpler. Bjorn Ulvaeus, better know as “that guy from ABBA,” wrote “It is easier and cheaper to steal than to download legally” in a whiney tirade against filesharers et. al. I leave aside some rich bastard complaining that people are not paying him to listen to “Dancing Queen” that he released 30 years ago. He has hit the nail on the head: definitely cheaper but also EASIER, Bjorn!

Several years ago, back before I even had an MP3 player, I had just few hundred CDs and a couple hundred DVDs, and my wife wanted a copy of a CD by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole. I know, your first reaction was, “Who?” He’s the guy that does the ukulele backed covers of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” mixed into “What a Wonderful World”. Yeah, the one they played over the montage at the end of ER when that one tall guy left the show. Try to buy a copy of that at your local Wal-Mart. Notice I said Wal-mart because your local record store is GONE. People want easy and cheap. They want to pick up a copy of Black Ice, bag of chips and a twelve pack, all at once, in the same store, for cheap.

Being somewhat technically savvy, I figured I’d just download a copy of IZ’s album and burn it for her. Since I already had Windows Media Player on my computer and a Microsoft Live account, I tried MSN Music. Everyone who knows what that is just yelled: “FUCTARD!” When that buggy, Digital Rights Management ridden service went belly up, I damn near lost $100 worth of downloaded music. Luckily, it was so nearly impossible to download and listen to any music from MSN that I immediately burned everything I got from them to CD minus any form of DRM. I tried several other services but they all require registration, software downloads, licensing, blah, blah, blah. If anyone who owns a copyright is listening, I don’t want to screw around with my computer, I want to listen to music. I want to listen in my car on a CD, streamed from my PC to my kids’ Playstation3 and blasted on the home theater, on my MP3 player at the top of a mountain or while I dig holes in my yard. Your music delivery system makes it harder if not downright impossible to do that. Amazon MP3 delivers DRM free music as cheaply as it gets (legally) but you still have to download and run their downloader to get an entire album and it still costs 99 cents a song. Because the music industry is so afraid that you will copy something if it doesn't have DRM (too late - rolls eyes), their selection is extremely limited.

Meanwhile, the torrent crowd has figured out how to deliver a complete album, DRM free, already tagged and stored in an appropriately named folder - for no charge. Set up properly, it will be on your MP3 player the next time you plug it in. Listen up, Bjorn, and all the rest of you industry types: people do not pay extra money to buy a quirky, hard to use product. Hell, most of the time they don’t pay extra money for easy to use products with all the features. It better be on a price drop at Wal-Mart.

You are not competing with free but you are competing with easier and cheaper. It takes a lot of time and effort to buy a computer, install software and figure out how to get music without paying for it. It is much easier and cheaper to buy a CD at Wal-Mart and shove it in the CD player in your car. Unfortunately, much of your younger demographic has access to Daddy’s computer. They don’t have access to his car or his money. Once they are set up to download all their entertainment for free, why the hell would they blow their date money on CDs? The problem is you are competing with EASIER and CHEAPER. If you don’t figure out how to deliver content to the masses in a very simple way, for way less than a dollar a song you are going to go the way of the horse drawn buggy. You’ll still be around but only as a quaint anachronism, like vinyl records or Betamax tapes.