Money (That's What I Want)

What would you call a business that secretly spies on its customers, threatens them with massive lawsuits if they refuse to re-purchase a product they've already bought, and generally assumes that they're all crooks out to steal merchandise?

Apparently, you'd call it the music business.

Many of you may already know about Sony's infamous rootkit scandal from 2005, in which the media giant was caught installing spyware on the PCs of everyone who bought their CDs - without, of course, bothering to ask permission first. Cybercrooks quickly figured out how to exploit the malware and Sony was faced with a raft of lawsuits, which are still wending their way through the legal system.

That was bad enough. Around the same time, however, the industry trade group The Recording Industry Association of America, began launching thousands of lawsuits against individuals who had shared songs they had already bought via Peer to Peer (P2P) networks such as Napster. The claim was that this was an effort to combat piracy and claims were made (wildly inflated, in my view) of the amount of revenue lost by the industry - despite the fact that industry profits remained spectacular.

It's an odd claim, considering that the victims of these lawsuits weren't actually making any money from their infringement. If piracy of copyrighted material is an issue why not go after the big international pirates who are selling the stuff for a profit, largely overseas?

The answer - if a recent “Justice” Department ruling is any indication - is that it's cheaper to take every last cent of song sharers here in the USA than it is to go after the big-time international crooks who are really eating your lunch. Taking a couple hundred grand from some poor schlemiel who shared tunes with his buddies is easy money when you already have an army of lawyers on retainer.

Will this have a deterrent effect of P2P music sharing? Probably. Will it have a deterrent effect on the big-money pirates? Almost certainly not. But if you've already decided that suing your customers is a valid business model, maybe you don't want the pirates to stop selling your stuff for $4.00 in Beijing. You've already given up on that, and having them around allows you to continue to make exaggerated claims about how much money you're losing.

Pay no attention to those massive profits behind the curtain. Government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation shall not perish from this earth.