fev 07 |
The unknown artist Benn Jordan found that his songs were being sold on iTunes and he, as a holder of 100% of copyright them (the songs were released on their own label) had not authorized anything, or was receiving a penny for every song sold. In other words, Apple was pirating his songs.
After trying in vain to contact Apple for a clarification, he released torrents of his last album on the Internet for free. The paranoia of American copyrights and sharing copyrighted material is so great that they began to think he was committing a crime against the RIAA - Recording Industry Association of America to upload your own music!
The interview he gave to the site TorrentFreak has some lines that shows very well the new direction the industry is taking. I copy some excerpts below and highlight the ones that caught my attention.
Many people that I'd meet at my shows would say that they bought my music on iTunes, yet I've never signed any sort of agreement allowing iTunes to host my music, and I've certainly never seen a dime of money for my albums hosted there.
[...]
I was told that once the files are in the iTunes system, it literally could not be removed or taken down for a year.
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I keep seeing these internet news stories saying things like "The Flashbulb Promotes Piracy". It is totally out of control. How could I be promoting piracy if I'm uploading my own material with a "buy it if you like it" message in the torrent?
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If you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself. Whether you're downloading my music to check it out, to accompany the CD, or even pirating it ... I want you to have a version / rip of it that I've listened to and approved of.
[...]
The thing RIAA is scared of is that their billion dollar backbone can no longer shelter people from exploring music themselves. Their business plan had evolved into telling the world what they will want to listen to and buy, and now they'll have to actually compete with talented artists again. As the people regain control of the market, music will be judged by it's content again and will be Subjected to it's own Darwinism. It is a very interesting time for the music industry ...
All this is not very different from the Pirate Coelho, the countryman Paulo Coelho, who after selling 1,000 books in Russia provided them free on the net and saw that number increase to 100,000 within 3 years, as he put it in the Digital, Life, Design . The interesting fact of the Pirate Coelho is the author talked with publishers so that they provided free books, as they have not stumbled, he created the blog and started to link all the copies of his works that found in FTPs, sites and networks to P2P.
It reminds me of a conversation we had in college, when some said they were born at the wrong time, would have been born at the time of our fathers, the time of Woodstock, peace & love, Hendrix, LSD and Clovis said, you do not realize, but we are living our era, with the Raves, electronic music, exctasy? Our children will say the same that we who were born at the wrong time, who wanted to be born at the time of raves ...
The revolution is silent and happens under our eyes.
