Just had to post a few links, sort of big picture stuff. The first one is from a recent column in InfoWorld:

The Gripe Line (Ed Foster): An Uphill Battle

"It's almost a bad joke to see how many bills to deprive consumers of digital products their rights were introduced in Congress this year..."

This article starts off talking about software, but stick with it. It goes into the efforts to get laws passed that will allow hacking the computers of P2P users. Corporate vigilante justice, enshrined as law. If they pull this off, any thinking person will shudder. This could be nothing less than the first move by corporations to take over the police powers of the state.

This link is to a recent John Dvorak article in PC Magazine.

One Buck Forty Or Die

He finsihes it up with this gem:
"The U.S. government should not be corrupted by the Recording Industry Association of America and should instead do more about (CD) price fixing. And let's stop lecturing people about legality and morality. Students in particular are not moral reprobates, nor are they fools. They are pragmatists, and they stretch the rules along with their budgets... Give up. Rethink your business model. The problem will be solved."

This article generated so much discussion on the PC Magazine Forums that he posted this follow-up:

When Is Stealing Not Stealing?

I don't always agree with him, but he's definitely asking the right questions in these articles.

As for Empire895 who laments that the opposition "can't even find the time to follow up on their beliefs but also don't have the intelligence to put it in their own words and truly express the reasonings behind their beliefs," I can only ask you this:

Have you ever worked for a big corporation?

There's a corporate goal, and everyone is expected to pursue it Nobody likes someone who brings up contrary ideas. Nobody's interested in opening a "dialog". Forget "reasoning" and if you have "beliefs" that differ from the corporate misson, leave 'em at home. Your job is to carry out orders that have been handed down from the top of the chain of command. If you don't do this, you're not a "team player".

RIAA has a mandate is to agressively eliminate, by any means possible, the threats to the continued AND CONTINUALLY EXPANDING profitability of the recording industry.

Corporations grow or they die. They don't want a smaller slice of the pie, no matter how greedy they've been in the past. That's called reduced earnings, and stockholders don't like it. And taking a short term loss for a long term gain is unacceptable. You're expected to have a short-term gain and a long term gain.

So the strategy is: fight like hell against any innovation that takes money out of their pocket in the short term, but lay the groundwork to profit from that innovation in the long term. That's what all these proposed laws are about. Once you can't buy a PC, a Mac, a Walkman or a PDA that doesn't have copy-protection hardwired in, RIAA will toss it's campaign against P2P like a used Big Mac wrapper.

The sad part is, by the time their plan is all sewn up, we will all have lost a lot of our legitimate rights. And they'll still be charging too much for music and screwing over artistis.