In an article in the September 9th issue of the Rocky Mountain News on page 1B (Viewable at the Rocky Mountain News website) John Accola details the specifics of the recent wave of RIAA lawsuits. Which raises the question: Which side am I on?

Well it is clear that the downloading of music is a blatant violation of the license on most songs. This means that the people who download the music are basically stealing. Now, as an interesting modifier, they are stealing at wholesale prices. I say this because their theft does not directly harm the printers, distributors, and vendors. Now the harm is still done, but it is indirect, because people don't buy the CD's, but the vendor doesn't loose money in missing merchandise that they have already paid the distributor for. So all in all, it's an act of theft.

But time for an interlude, notice that the RIAA is the ones suing, not the ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.) This is due to a simple reason. According to the ASCAP, 1 Million albums = $2,400,000.00. If the album ($17.00 for their estimate) has 20 tracks on it, that means 20 million tracks, worth 2.4 million dollars. Now seems like a lot of money. But this means that your 1000 file, 3 gigabyte collection is worth $120 to the artist. It actually comes up under the limit for a criminal charge. But realize that the companies that the RIAA represents have a lot more at stake. The retailer has put a 60% markup of the $17.00 disc, so they bought it from the record company at $10.20. The record company then pays the $2.04 to the artist. This makes their stake $8.16. Now, apply that over the same 1 million albums, with 20 million tracks. Their stake is $408. Now realize that the record companies often charge artists additional fees that are deducted from the $120 the artist gets. Now for the final blow. The ASCAP represents 160,000 artists. The RIAA represents 6 companies. Now if you realize that no one is going to complain unless they personally (or at the company level) are going to loose a significant amount of money. Now, if you, and say 60 million of your friends have 1000 songs each, the whole file sharing community hurts the record companies by 24.48 Billion Dollars. The whole file sharing community hurts the artists by 7.2 Billion dollars. Now, the whole file sharing community hurt one of the record companies by say, AOL Time Warner, by 4.08 Billion dollars. The whole file sharing community hurt the artist, say Lincoln Park, by $45,000 dollars. $45,000 isn't enough for any one group to afford a lawyer. And since that $45,000 dollars is actually $.00075 60 million times. The artists really just don't have enough of a vested interest to make it worth perusing the thieves. The same applies to the record companies, $68.00 a person 60 million times. As you can see, any one record company sees a HUGE hit per person as compared to any one artist.

But at this point, we now have to ask, who is stealing more: the file sharing community or the record companies. Both are clearly stealing. But according to RIAA lawyers (as quoted in the RMN),  the per song damage is $750 - $150,000. Now if those people bought the album, these songs are only worth 51 cents to the record companies. So the question is what could humanly possibly take a song worth 51 cents PRESSED ONTO THE DISK, why would a downloaded song, which completely bypasses all distribution cost, necessitate be worth a modification factor of 1,470 to 294,117 times the value of the song? Even if you charge the cost of the song on the disk for each time it is played, it would mean you played that one song for some period between 3 days 1.5 hours and 1.679 years. If they are only pursuing people who have 1000 songs or more, this maxes out at a playing time of 1678.75 years!!! The Islamic religion has had less playing time per person than the suggested price of damages suggested by the RIAA lawyers.

Thus, despite the fact that the community is committing crimes that are intolerable, the RIAA is attempting to commit a crime on a magnitude incomparable to the people they are prosecuting. So I have decided to side with the lesser of two evils. And then promptly turn around and tell them "QUIT STEALING THE MUSIC!!!"

Addendum: Further investigation has clarified the $750 - $150,000 issue. Apparently, what they are attacking is the UPLOADERS, not the downloaders. What this means is that they are perusing the "right to control presentation" component of the copyright law. This implies that they feel that every time someone downloads the song, the person sharing it is doing an unlicensed presentation of the content. with say 5000 people downloading 1 song, that is 5000 presentations worth $2550 in presentation royalties. This makes a lot of sense. This gives you a total play time of 10 and a half days, but only 3 minutes a person.