mp3's, laws, and culture

[volvoguy]

Last time I checked, this mailing list was for talking about anything
and everything - not necessarily Ubuntu related. I may get a little
long winded, so if the subject matter doesn't interest you, feel free
to skip to the next message. :-)

As some of you may know, I'm recovering from a major back surgery and
preparing for another (probably after the first of the year). This
means that I have a LOT of free time on my hands.

So I was visiting my parent's house over the weekend and my mom
pointed out an interesting article in Good Housekeeping magazine. It
was all about simple and inexpensive gifts you could make for friends.
Pretty uninteresting, right? I thought so until I came to the
instructions for ripping cd's and burning custom compilations for all
your friends! They make no mention of the fact that this is illegal,
or that you should only do this with music that you hold the copyright
for.

I have some pretty strict standards for myself in regards to "trading"
music. I have several friends that share my musical tastes and we
frequently swap mp3's of music we think another person might like.
Technically that's illegal. We justify it like this - the traded mp3's
are STRICTLY for evaluation purposes only. If we like the music, we
buy the cd. If we don't like it we delete it. I usually get a lot of
"yeah, right" responses about this, but surely the 600+ cd collection
I have and the thousands of mp3's on my computer that were ripped from
those cd's is enough proof that I'm not stealing anything - but that's
hard to convince someone online about. In the case of my friends and
I, sharing mp3's equals significantly more cd sales. As a
semi-professional musician, I can totally understand why some artists
are so anti-piracy.

Then we have a mainstream magazine with millions of subscribers
basically telling people to break the law. Ignorance of the law is not
an excuse, right? I'm not writing this to start a flame war about
greedy labels/artists or copyright law - but I'm curious about what my
peers think about this seemingly innocent article. To put it in
perspective, it would be like Wired magazine running an article
detailing the steps to pirate commercial software.

The nice guy in me wants to just send them a friendly email to make
them aware of this serious issue. The musician in me (who sometimes
depends on his music to pay the bills) wants to email the RIAA or some
other authority. Either way, I feel like I should let SOMEONE know
that this mainstream magazine is encouraging people to break the law -
unknowingly or not.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Gasps of unbelief? :-)

-- 
Aaron

Ubuntu SVG Artwork - www.volvoguy.net/ubuntu
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Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. ~ G.K. Chesterton