The ongoing drama and love lost between the public and the mighty media overlords of the RIAA and MPAA has been dominating technology press for several years now. Part of the reason is because it's the gradual undoing of a longstanding empire, the kings on the mountain who have long held the keys to our entertainment culture. But the other reason is that they are losing ground and market share to technology, which is something that they don't like one bit.

In the wake of this reality, we've seen them resist the evolution of media consumption and instead try to stifle it. Lawsuits have been waged - and continue - and "awareness" campaigns have been launched. And the general public is mostly left wondering when companies started suing their consumers, how possessing a song file could legally be worth up $250K of "lost" revenue, and why the very artists that these large companies claim to represent and protect are often very vocally at odds with them.

Welcome to what happens when you threaten an ailing monopoly refusing to fix its broken business model. You don't fix the model, you instead try to "fix" the competition. They blame piracy, but the pirates aren't the real problem. People pirated before MP3s, and they'll pirate the next format to come along. Lost revenue is part of the problem, but not all of it. Sure, sales have been going down at an impressive rate for a while now, but laying the blame on pirates is easier than fixing the real issue. And the real issue is that they're losing control - the keys to their mighty kingdom - and are playing whatever cards they can to hang on to it.

The Movie

Rip! A Remix Manifesto does a very commendable job of examining the many problems in this scenario. And there are a lot of them. There's the problem with suing your customers (it's not only an idiotic business move, but is based on either unverifiable or just false information), the problem with the public's set of rights in regards to copyright (we're supposed to have some), there's the problem with monopolies buying our culture away from us (copyright was built to expire and that content to then belong to the people), and finally the problem with precedence (the stripping away of rights to music and movies can then be applied to other more damaging areas of our culture). Yep, there are a lot of problems to wade through.

Article Author: David R Perry

Lost somewhere in the rolling hills of Tennessee, David R Perry can occasionally be found doing dark, unspeakable things to words. Printed words, spoken words, electronically mangled words... really any kind but twittered words.

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