In elementary school, my younger sister and I would make lists of all the CDs we wanted and would save our money to go and buy them. It’s no surprise that when I discovered burning CDs, I went crazy. Shortly thereafter, I discovered Napster and Limewire, and continued to use Limewire up until February 2009, when I got an email from NYU (which I was going to past here, but it’s far too long) stating that they caught me on my ResNet connected computer, and threatened to suspend my ResNet connection until I resolved the matter. This was followed by the original report from the RIAA, which is also too long to copy and paste here.
John Tehranian summed it up beautifully in Infringement Nation when he wrote, “Copyright maximalists, such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry of America (RIAA) have bemoaned the Internet’s potential to transform any teenager with a computer into a grand larcenist” (538). Breaking the law was obviously not my incentive when I took these songs—I was just doing what everyone else was doing, and (as my luck would have it) got caught (though fortunately, I’m not Jammie Thomas-Rasset (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_v._Thomas)).
I do understand why artists wouldn’t want their music out in the open for everyone to have access too, because making (and selling) music is how they make a living. This is why in 2000, heavy metal band Metallica filed a lawsuit against Napster, alleging that they violated three different areas of the law: copyright infringements, unlawful use of digital audio interface device, and the Racketeering Influenced & Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) (http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2000/04/35670).
But, of course, there is also the bright side to free downloading. Radiohead’s latest album, In Rainbows, was first released on October 10th, 2007, as a download available for order from www.inrainbows.com. At this site, customers could pay whatever price they saw fit for a digital download of the album. The standard CD release would not be available until the last week of 2007.
Radiohead clearly promotes downloading music as well—but what band wouldn’t be if it captured the number one spot on the Billboard 200 because of free downloading? In July 2000, three months prior to the release of Kid A, MP3 tracks of the entire album were available on Napster. Because of Napster, millions of Radiohead fans had possession of Kid A by the time the CD hit stores, even though they didn’t pay a cent for it. As a result, the band, which had never hit the US top 20 before, found the number one spot in Kid A’s debut week. Considering the experimental record had no radio airplay or big time marketing, this success was proof of the promotional powers of file trading and free downloading (http://www.greenplastic.com/band/).
It is true that “we are in the midst of a “‘Participation Age’ of remix culture, blogs, podcasts, wikis, and peer-to-peer file-sharing”” (540), and this certainly has to be taken into account in terms of the law. As it turns out, though, this is way easier said than done!
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