Reuters reports: “The Recording Industry Association of America (news – web sites) began filing lawsuits against individual users this fall, and so far has reached at least 220 out-of-court settlements, usually for $5,000 or less.”

Let’s do the math on this. 220 times $5K is $1.1 million dollars. Now subtract the estimated cost of each such suit to the RIAA. I’d say the cost of instigating any sort of lawsuit is at least a thousand bucks. Maybe twice that. Conceivably much more than that. So they are netting, and this is being nice, less than a million bucks a year suing their fans and their customers. The RIAA is a group of companies representing artists. How much do you think Mettalica’s share of that few thousand dollars is worth? How much does Madonna benefit from that? It’s a complete joke that the RIAA has gone to war with their fans.

They argue: it’s not the money it’s changing people’s attitudes about copyright infringement. I guess they want to put the fear of god in file traders. Again, what is the net benefit to Madonna? For the most part, pissed off people. The common case of file trading is a common trait of fan behavior and fan behavior is what creates revenues for record companies. Even for smaller names, the economics are the same — the best way to make money is to have a lot of people that love your music. Don’t sue those people.

I don’t think people should steal music. In this new networked world, record companies need to figure out how to create a valuable relationship with their customers because that’s what their customers want. Your average music buying listener loves to buy music. The mp3 phenomena is ultimately a good thing for record labels once they figure out how to capitalize on their real strength, which is that fact that customers like the artists they listen to. The market for any artist is as big as the number of people that like them. mp3’s introduce artists to future customers. The record companies have been slow to react to this fact. They still haven’t.

Here’s an example:

“Bless My MP3” — Fill out this form for an mp3 from our label. You answer these questions and join our list and we’ll give you a personal license for that song for free. It’s legal now. All you have to do is join our list.

Now market to your fans. Offer them (for a price) early release downloads, artwork, t-shirts and crap, show tickets, movie tickets, cool mp3 players. Use the songs they register to profile the person (a la Amazon) and market their favorite bands to them. Suggest other new bands.

This is one little tiny idea of how record companies could use the mp3 phenomena to their advantage.

A new articile is here. Even more music enthusiasts being sued for spreading the word about the artists they love. Another few grand will go into the record companies’ pockets and a few billion in bad blood will be created. The RIAA is killing music. Let’s kill them. Any label in the RIAA should be boycotted.

SCO, the shit-ass company that decided they can’t compete in the marketplace so they will compete in the courtroom, is now turning their attention to the Feds. This is not so noteworthy but provides a nice opportunity for me to bash them. Here is a quote from the above:

“Free or low-cost open-source software, full of proprietary code, is grabbing an increasing portion of the software market. Each open-source installation displaces or pre-empts a sale of proprietary, licensable and copyright-protected software,” McBride said in a letter, republished by the Open Source and Industry Alliance. “This means fewer jobs, less software revenue and reduced incentives for software companies to innovate.”

This is the scary part about this SCO bullshit. Almost everyone agrees that SCO does not have much of a case. The problem is, we have a government, controlled by the Republicans, which always sides with industry. The above argument from McBride will resonate with the trickle-down good ol’ boy capitalists. Now clearly you cannot even wage, not to mention win, a war against Open Source. The government cannot take action against the willful cooperation of developers to contribute to Open Source. They can, however, back ill-conceived efforts like that of SCO. I wouldn’t put it past them. The problem is, the Open Source movement now has the vehement support of IBM, Novell, Apple, Sun, Google, Amazon, etc. If you are on the side of industry you can’t draw a clean line here — it turns out Open Source is good for industry, it creates great software, it adds a ton of value and in many ways it is driving our economy. For example, the Apache web server software is a big win for a lot of companies. It is bundled with a lot of operating systems and applications. Many companies dedicate paid programmers to Open Source.

So, as usual, McBride is wrong. His motivation is lining his own pockets and should not be interpreted as any valid economic argument against Open Source. McBride is a loser who makes his living litigating instead of competing and that is anti-marketplace. SCO is going to die and they should die and McBride should take his anti-competitive bullshit off the table.

There are two general arguments people make when people sue to have the Ten Commandments removed from a court house or government building near you:

1. This country (or state) was founded on Judeo-Christian values and we should recoginze this fact as a foundation of our government and do away with this whole separation of church and state business.
2. This is an issue of free speech and religious free speech is being attacked.

For the first argument we may be in a situation where 2 + 2 = 5 because enough people vote for it. If you truly believe #1 then you should agree that we need a constitutional amendment saying that we have no separation of church and state and the church is X. It’s the same thing. I think if we had an amendment that we are a Christian nation, it might pass. That’s scary as fuck because it destroys one of the things that makes America great: religion is free.

For #2, clearly if this were the issue one solution would be to allow the religious free speech of any religion on government property to an equitible degree. This is hard but not impossible. No one is proposing it. The people that want the 10 Commandments on the lawn of the court house want it there because they agree with the religion. They are making a secular decision based on religious arguments. I am still apalled that Judeo-Christians are so willing to trample the separation of church and state. For religion to remain free, the state has to be utterly impartial. We are a secular state, folks, regardless of our origins and everyone, Christians included, want the separation of church and state. If you want your religion to stay free, you have to feverishly support the separation of church and state. I’m sorry to say that means the statue of your religious document has to be put somewhere else. Put it in your front yard, put it on your business property, put it anywhere you want except on our public property.

I saw a great bumper sticker that said “Don’t believe everything you think.” This is profound. Everyone, myself included, believes things that, if we were to gain more insight, more facts or considered it more carefully, we disagree with. We disagree with some things we think. That’s pretty funny. It is really important that we all keep this in mind. If you believe that everything you think is 100% for sure correct, you are a moron with a deluded view of your own perfection. I suspect everyone reading this agrees: none of us are perfect and some of what we believe is wrong.

This is important because debate is often seen as each side trying to convince the other they are right. It is seldom that we are open to being convinced! The paralytic political warfare we are all suffering through (and participating in) does not further the issues. We don’t get nearer the truth. If you read my blog is it clear I am a raging liberal but I still feel a responsibility to seek the truth, even in cases where it may not appear to match the liberal agenda. I don’t want to be right because I shouted louder and longer than the other guy, I want to be right because the facts agree.

So I’m asking you to remember that there is room in your world view for improvement. You can learn and grow and your beliefs and opinions may change in the process. This is good! Leave the door ajar on your opinions and beliefs.