There are a handful of issues that would influence the general direction of the human race in years to come. Terrorism, oil scarcity, trade imbalances and worldwide poverty come to mind, and these are the ones most commonly discussed in mainstream media. There is however, another important battle being waged that is far removed from the minds of the everyday person. That battle is Recording Industry vs The People.
Some of the posts at the above blog are awesome reads and point to an alarming pattern of abuse of the United States’ judicial system by large corporations with armies of lawyers at their disposal waging a war against ordinary American citizens. The scary part is that the agenda the RIAA is pushing with its’ strong-arm tactics seems to point towards a conclusion that because sharing of copyrighted material is detrimental to their business model, _all _file-sharing should be considered as criminal activity.
At a time that the world is supposedly entering an Age of Information, the outcome of this battle threatens to pull the upcoming age in one of two directions: On one side, a world where large companies monopolize the creation and delivery of content to the addicted consumer masses. On the other side, a world where people can choose to share their own creations freely and without fear of being branded as communists, a world where people have the choice to patronize freely-shared creations or those offered for a fee.
While these are concerns under American law only, the very nature of the distribution system being challenged – the internet – makes this a global issue as well. Though “the internet” is still only a vague concept in the minds of the majority of the world’s citizens, the day will eventually come when almost everybody is online. The question is, when that day comes, would you want to live in the world the RIAA is building?
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