Kazaa and Effect

Students: Steven M. Marks, general counsel to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), is disappointed in you. His clients have made available, in Marks’ words, “exciting new digital models that offer fans, including college students, their favorite music how they want it and where they want it.” Yet still, wayward students, you flout him, resorting to illegal free downloads without stopping for a moment to consider buying the $20 CD. Marks goes on to paint a harrowing portrait of a world free of music, consumed by collegiate greed: “thousands of regular, working class musicians and others out of work, stores shuttered, new bands never signed.” Look what you’ve done, miserly undergraduates.

All this was to be found in the press release on the RIAA Website announcing the trade organization’s eighth “wave” of pre-litigation letters sent to some of American universities’ most profligate downloaders (evidently, the first seven waves failed to frighten people off).

This new offensive was followed by a high-profile legal victory over Jammie Thomas, a Native American woman who may have illegally transmitted twenty-four songs over the peer-to-peer transfer program called Kazaa. The jury that ruled on Ms. Thomas’ case awarded the plaintiffs $9,250 in damages per song, totaling $220,000. Though Ms. Thomas could have originally settled for much less, it seems the record companies’ strategy in the case of harshly punishing customers who step out of line is representative.

The problem remains that most Americans already know the suffering of the Clive Davises of the world. They simply do not care. The record companies have been pouting for nearly a decade, nervously adjusting their ties in anticipation of a business model rendered rudderless by the advent of the Internet and new media. Most Americans still click “download” without a tinge of sympathy, not out of contempt for their favorite musicians but for the grubby intermediary that skims around 85 percent off each record sale.

But now their desperation has begotten tactics far more deplorable than simple grousing and token settlements: abject fabrication and large-scale punitive litigation. Marks’ allegation about roaming bands of hungry musicians is not only prevarication, it’s revisionism; if anything is impeding “working class musicians,” it’s the avarice of the men in the same boardroom where Steven gets his morning muffin.

Still graver is the case of Ms. Thomas, a young, single mother who was unable to afford, on a stipend from her tribe, the costly legal counsel of technology experts who might have buttressed her assertion that she was innocent of the RIAA’s accusations. Of course the association’s lawyers have every right to prosecute on copyright law, but their insistence on heavy-handed punishment of Ms. Thomas verges on the absurd; it seems entirely disproportionate to the purported crime.

But even as the darkness of court cases looms in the minds of college students across the country, day may be breaking overseas, as the British band called Radiohead offers an innovative solution to the musical conundrum: listeners can buy a digital copy of their newest album for whichever price they may choose. Not only will this aid in pricing the music market, but it might mean we can be rid of the tyrants at Columbia and Sony forever. Here’s to a music world without middlemen. Here’s to the pot of gold at the end of In Rainbows.