Reprinted from July 2003 Intermountain Acoustic Musician by permission of the author

Things have been pretty slow in the bluegrass underground this month. Not much to report, other than some whining about Rhonda Vincent having been seen in a navel-revealing bare midriff ensemble, which is Too Racy For Bluegrass. (Rhonda is an unmitigated Babe, and I would personally encourage her to show however much skin she feels like showing. Woo woo.)

However, in various discussion groupson the 'net there has been a lot of traffic on the topic of internet music file-sharing, and the recording industry's response to it. I happen to hold fairly strong views on the subject. And now I'll inflict some of them on you, dear readers, in the following paragraphs posted earlier to one of those groups. Hey, I didn't spend thirty-odd years as a philosopher for nothing.

IT AIN'T NECESSARILY SO...

The Recording Industry claims to be losing a gazillion dollars a year because of file trading. Which is a crock of guano. They aren't LOSING a dang cent. What they should be saying (but aren't) is that they are FAILING TO MAKE a gazillion dollars a year. That claim is dubious, and furthermore calls for the reply "So what?"

The underlying principle they're trying to get us to accept is that they DESERVE TO MAKE a gazillion dollars a year, and if they don't meet that goal they are (a) deprived of something that is rightfully theirs, and (b) entitled to compensation for it. Which is another crock. When an industry fails to make as much money as it would like, it's not because their "right-to-make lots -of-money" has been violated in some way; it's because they're not running their business right. They want you to believe that money-not-made is the same as money-stolen; but don't you fall for it.

Why are they failing to make their supposed gazillions? Because people aren't buying as many CD's as the industry would like them to. How do they calculate the exact number of gazillions they are failing to make? By figuring (somehow) the number of CD's they WOULD have sold IF some condition or other had failed to obtain.

The condition they are currently focusing on is file-trading. (Back when, it was home taping of FM radio stations.) They then argue that if x-many file swaps had not taken place, they would have sold y-many more CD's. Ergo, file-swapping reduced their hoped-for profits by several gazillions. Which is a third crock. The relationship between number of files swapped, and number of CD purchases not made, is an absolute imponderable (just as it was with radio taping and LP non-buying). Trying to figure out why people are NOT buying a given product is a generally fruitless undertaking. Maybe it's because the product sucks. Maybe it's because there are available alternatives that are free (Linux?). Maybe it's because the economy has taken a nose-dive and people are re-prioritizing. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

But whatever the reason, THEY ARE NOT OWED FOR CD'S NOT BOUGHT. They have no economic, legal, or moral right to a given number of product sales, even though they claim otherwise. And the attempt to make the general public pay them for CD's they HAVEN'T sold, is ridiculous.

But because the "stealing money from us" ploy won't work, they have another one: the "intellectual property rights" ploy. "The music belongs to US, and if you use it (listen to it), you owe us a fee for the use of our property. Otherwise, you're STEALING...not money, but our intellectual property." Stated thus baldly, it seems silly on its face. Certainly, if I make a profit from your songs, I owe you a piece of it. I think that's basically the ASCAP position: if a piece of music helps you financially or business-wise, you owe royalties. (BTW, I hate ASCAP and BMI, but that's a topic for a different time.)

But I do not owe you money for the "privilege" of LISTENING to your songs (reading your novels, watching your plays, studying your paintings, etc.). "Intellectual property" is a misnomer when applied to artistic creations, since they don't and can't fit the parameters of property ownership. A different set of concepts apply, though the Recording Industry wishes it were otherwise. (Check out the history and purpose of copyright law for more details on this.) If I listen to your song, I don't owe you anything for doing so. And if I borrow a recording and listen to it later, I still don't owe you anything. (The Recording Industry, on the other hand, would love to get in on the software industry myth, and license each CD only for use by a single person on a single CD player, in a format that self-destructs after a fixed number of plays...if they could just figure out a way to get away with it.) And if I make a copy of that recording, so I can return yours to you and still listen to it later, I STILL don't owe you anything. I have "taken" nothing of value from you, have not used your creation to line my own pockets, and have not violated any property rights you can lay legitimate claim to. Likewise, it doesn't matter if someone just emailed me the file rather than handing me the CD to copy.

No doubt, the Recording Industry would PREFER that nobody borrow CD's, that everybody buy their own, and so on. (Segments of the publishing industry hate lending libraries.)But the industry has no right to demand that their preferences be met, or else compensated.

The whole flap about file-sharing is one that the Recording Industry has manufactured, flying under the false colors of "taking money away from us" and "stealing our property". Those two claims are bogus, and so is the file sharing flap. And needless to say, nothing I've said has any bearing on the practice of making counterfeit CD's for sale. THAT is precisely the sort of abuse that copyright law is intended to prevent. And it has no bearing on the practice of file-sharing.

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