RIAA should go MIA

I’ll admit it—I’m an ex-filesharer. In middle school I was all about Napster, I rocked Kazaa in high school, and in the dorms OurTunes allowed me to fileshare with everyone in the lakeshore area. I am a person who is a complete stickler for rules—I never even speed or jaywalk, yet I feel absolutely no remorse about any of the alleged “stealing” I’ve done over the years. Why? Simple—the RIAA. With millions upon millions of dollars in revenue, they feel the need to prosecute students and new technologies in an attempt to lose their monopoly on the music industry. Instead of investing in these new technologies and new ways to regulate them legally, they do their best to ban them and monetarily enforce compliance. I see it as a form of civil disobedience to fileshare and thus lack any remorse. Unfortunately, as much as I would love to continue, I’ve had to stop for fear of losing my life savings (my budget doesn’t really have room for a lawsuit) when the RIAA started prosecuting students here at Madison. I refuse, however, to buy any CDs or music on iTunes due to their outrageous cost, and the fact that I would be supporting the awful institution that is the RIAA.

The anecdotes told by Lawrence Lessig in Free Culture only support my previously held beliefs. The fact that the RIAA prosecuted a college student for modifying a search engine that inadvertently allowed students to fileshare and in essence robbed him blind angers me even more than just the few stories I’ve heard about UW-Madison students who were prosecuted. Just like Fast Food Nation has stopped me from eating at McDonalds, I think Free Culture has cemented my “boycott” of CDs and the music business in general. I’m not quite ready to give up on movies yet due to ovguide.com and all of the free movies I can stream—if that ever gets shut down, however, it might be a completely different story…