Real Politiks

“RIAA members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States.” They are the mercenary lawyers of the recording industry, working hard “to protect intellectual property rights worldwide and the First Amendment rights of artists…The RIAA® also certifies Gold®, Platinum®, Multi-Platinum™, and Diamond sales awards, as well as Los Premios De Oro y Platino™, an award celebrating Latin music sales.”

Anyone who has ever become paranoid about the content piracy they are engaged in will be familiar with the shade of the RIAA looming triumphant in their nightmares. They are the ones that come crashing through the door and take your computer in the name of the recording industry. They are the ones that threaten your future for downloading music, and campaign to remind the public that copyright infringement is a serious crime after all. For the simple minded this issue is black and white – crime is crime – and criminals should be prosecuted.

The truth is that the issue is not that black and white. Internet “piracy” as it has called by the industry, and been righteously adopted by the underground, is not just a generation of thieves that should be sued into the ground. It is in fact a cultural phenomena, and technological progression that the RIAA is working hard to stamp out. For at least the last two decades cultural activists have been concerned about the centralization of creative control into the hands of a few major media conglomerates. Their concern was that eventually corporations would be able to define what culture would be from one end to the other, music to fashion.

Well, peer-to-peer technology, the technology at the root of the piracy underground, is the means to break that growing corporate media centralization. It is also the technology that the media lobby has stated its intent to destroy. Destroy not just because of the piracy actually going on, but also because of the possibility for piracy the technology creates. Instead of working to fit their business models to the new distribution technology, they have opted to become its largest adversary.

The problem created by the RIAA is more complex than just their declared war on technological progress, however. In their infinite wisdom, you will note from the quote on the top of the page, they also declare what art is to be legitimate and what art is illegal. In their capacity as the gods of art they have already sought to destroy the career of more than one artist for using samples without paying sampling fees. I will not belabor the issue by telling you that this is exactly the situation that the cultural activists have feared for the last two decades.

We now live in a time when the corporate media conglomerates can hire their mercenary lawyers to define what culture can survive and what culture will not. We live in a time where these same conglomerates can wage an open war against technological progress that threatens their business models, and have the mass media glaze over the issue as merely a question of copyright piracy. Now is not the time for pretending to moral simplicity, as the threat of monoculture is looming triumphant in the shade of the RIAA.