RIAA: copyright length is ludicrously long

The RIAA is going to chase individuals now as part of their attempt to retain control over the sale and distribution of music. In the last 18 months this organisation has been so protective that they have managed to get the copyright period extended to 90 years for an individual and over 100 years for a company (eg. Disney).

That's a far cry from the original 14 year copyright period and the notion of allowing someone to benefit from creative thought but not rest on their laurels for ever.

In an interesting contrast, take the pharmaceutical companies and the vast amounts of effort and money they spend on developing new products. For all that they only get a patent period of 20 years.

Unlike the music business, the US government is opposed to drug companies having greater protection of their developments.

Last October it was reported that President Bush's proposal to limit the ability of biotech and pharmaceutical firms to protect products from being replaced by generic versions before their patent expires was regarded as a way to speed affordable medicines to consumers.

An article in the Washington Post today (Friday, 20 June) says "The Senate yesterday sought to help Americans buy less costly medicines by making it harder for pharmaceutical companies that invent and manufacture brand-name drugs to fend off competition from makers of generic substitutes."

I'm not arguing for a longer patent period for drug companies but I would like the copyright period on music and other products reduced to a more equitable time period. Twenty years and shrinking for life-saving drugs and 110 years AND GROWING for some cartoons and music - it makes no sense. .

cheers

John McLean

It greatly saddens me to see the unnecessary struggles between the RIAA and the good people of the world whom they selflessly serve.

The RIAA has been forced to actually "win" the right to force our ISPs to disclose our personal information in its righteous battle against the evils of peer to peer software sharing. Until now, p2p software users have mistakenly been enjoying a communist "free-for-all" mentality and an unchristian "live and let live" philosophy. But the RIAA has recently made public their decision to hunt down and file suits against individual file sharers who use Kazaa, eMule and other heinous P2P file sharing programs. If something isn't done soon, the RIAA will be forced to incarcerate and cleanse a vast majority of the nation's youth, which would cripple the U.S. economic engine and force more of our businesses to move to India, possibly including the recording industy itself. And I hate Indian music. The chaos resulting from the RIAA's needless war against children can be easily resolved, though, and I'm here to tell you how.

My proposal, should it be deemed worthy and fitting to those amongst us who still care about children and money and the freedom to work so we can afford to pay for music is to take the crime out of file sharing by removing the intent and knowledge of file sharing. The answer is fairly straightforward. Someone must write a virus which points out the flaw in the RIAA's inefficient war against children and gets straight to the real heart of this matter--the evils of the internet.

This hypothetical virus, which I'll name "BruceBlocker" for the sake of conversation (and after the legendary Bruce J. Block, the Senior Vice President of Technology for the RIAA) would infiltrate your windows system through any of its 20,214 known vulnerable security holes. Once inside, it would quietly embed itself deep in memory, where it would install Kazaa Lite on your machine. It would then run Kazaa Lite in the background and conduct searches for MP3 music files, which it would allow Kazaa Lite to distribute without the user's consent. Finally, it would quietly use MSIMN.EXE to propagate itself.

Ideally, the sorce code for the software which installs itself and installs Kazaa Lite would be freely available on the internet. The viral portions of the code would (predictably) be added by criminals, anarchists, terrorists and other hostile "foreign elements" who hate our freedom to pay for music. There would be a hundred flavors and varieties of this software floating around the net and infiltrating people's computers in a quiet and undetectable manner.

The RIAA would be forced at that point to rethink their policy of attacking individual children and conducting their hopeless war of terror against the world's netizens. They would have to prove in each case that the "violator" was intentionally sharing music files and that they were not subject to a viral attack by these various criminal elements. Since the virus would spread aggressively into everyone's machine, nobody could legitimately be held guilty, unless the U.S. was planning on imprisoning the entire world. This would only work in the best interests of file sharing criminal masterminds (like that Napster kid and his evil communist friends).

Perhaps Bruce Block would discover his own computer sharing music in the disgusting and perverse manner of our poor mislead children and students. The ethical dilemmas potentially faced by corporations who support the RIAA, the DMCA and other means of complete, beneficial governmental control over online culture would be appalled after learning of their continuous and unwitting participation in p2p file sharing. This might make them reappraise their policies and consider a more direct and efficient approach to the problem of free music, "free software" and free thinking in general.

Ultimately, this would bridge the gap between corporations and common individuals. The "BruceBlocker" virus would foster a culture of unity and rapport between students and corporations, each of whom would be its common victims and subject to legal scrutiny. They would join hands in defense of their common liberties and strike out against the evils of the internet.

The U.S. judiciary, with the backing of the populace and the beneficial corporate fiefdoms could then skip straight to the end of this long struggle and ban forever the internet, unamerican reading materials, writing, the sharing of books (with the exception of the Bible and selected works of B.F. Skinner), public discussion and maybe even (finally) bring all newspapers under strict control of the US government (with Bruce Block, Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch as the governing triumvirate in the "Department of Reason"). This would forever cement our security and safety from Redware developers (like the makers of "Red"Hat and the evil internet companies in "Red"mond).

We could then as a nation face the issue manifest destiny, and return to militarily and economically dominating the entire planet through the might of our ever expanding industrial and military capacities.

I submit this in the name of unity and liberty against the excesses of "free music" and those godless music haters who want to force America's recording industry to move to India. God spare their demon souls.

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