Continued from part 1:
While a person’s physical music collection is (at least to the owner) priceless, there’s a genuinely calculable and traceable dollar value that can be attached to the legal contents of the “My Music” folder of your hard drive. This, in my opinion, actually de-values the music and therefore the artistic worth of the original work. Their efforts have been reduced to a few megabytes which, on a more fruitful note, at least could potentially appear on several million folks’ hard drives or archive.org, instead of gathering mildew in a warehouse somewhere.
The smart thing to do is to make a backup of said folder… but is that actually desired by the music industry? Why would they want you to be able to listen to that MP3 until you fucking well die? Do they have the interests of the consumer/fan and the artist at heart, or is there some new format on the horizon?
Remember that this is the same “industry” that, until quite recently, shoved DRM down our throats and attempted to dictate when, where, how often, and on what device you may listen to music that you did legally purchase and download. It’s the same industry that continues to charge you 99c per track (or about 10 dollars for a full album) of recordings that were made some 30 or 50 years ago! It’s the same industry that milks any artist whose catalogue they have the rights to for years on end. Something’s not right.
And what of the legalities of a backup or 2nd-hand ownership?
If there’s a CD/tape/DVD/LP/MD in my collection that I don’t like anymore, I could either toss it, sell it, or give it away to someone else. Nobody seems to have an issue with that — by owning the piece of plastic that contains the sounds, I automatically also own the right to play those contents as and where I choose. Or do I? A transfer of ownership of the physical sound carrier naturally leads to a transfer of rights of the contents thereof (although it obviously does not include claiming ownership of the sound recordings).
And what of backups or rips of that CD? In theory, I should destroy them.
In practice, that is unlikely to happen. Those ripped songs will, in all likelihood, remain on the CD’s previous owner’s hard drive. Matters can get a little more involved should the previous owner have burnt the MP3 rips of his favourite songs onto a CD-ROM so that he could listen to it (along with perfectly legal rips of other CDs he owns) in the car or via the laptop at the office.
What is he to do — re-burn the CD-ROM without those now “illegal” MP3s? Yeah, right!
He can’t give it away, he can’t keep it. In fact, it’s not allowed to exist anymore.
Imagine now that our original owner dies. Chances are that relatives would inherit his CD/vinyl/music collection and absorb them into their own if the tastes are compatible. Or sell the whole lot if not, or is known to be worth something. Or a bit of both. Or neither, it becomes landfill. The physical media has value. It exists as some sort of tangible matter, even if only as coasters or artwork or raw material for the local recycling plant. Continue reading →
