Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I must respectfully disagree. The purpose of the RIAA is not to "be nice" to people, but to punish criminals.
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And they are very good at lobbying international trade bodies to negotiate treaties that require signatory governments to create new crimes that people will commit, thus enabling the RIAA to send their lawyers after them.
Hint: the technical term for this is "rent seeking", and if there was any real justice in the world, the RIAA and MPAA would be on the receiving end of a RICO indictment.
Second (heavy) hint: the money they collect does not, for the most part, go to musicians, artists, and other creative types: it goes to the RIAA and MPAA.
Third hint: they've turned lawsuits into a profit centre -- a practice sometimes known as barratry, and regretably not currently a felony in its own right.
Bluntly, they're scum -- gangsters and extortionists who have figured out that lobbying for their business model to be legalized is the quick route to profits. They're strangling actual creativity in the crib, and damaging our social infrastruture in the process.
(I speak as a full-time professional novelist whose works are, from time to time, pirated, and who considers your proposed cure to be infinitely worse than the disease.)