In America over the past decade, the debate has been over whether file sharing is detrimental to the music industry. Well, certainly the record and radio companies are suffering. They blame file sharing, though the evidence points more toward the corporations, sabotaging themselves through increasingly expensive mergers, acquisitions, and contracts which buried them in debt. Some musicians are taking the record companies' side, while others embrace file sharing, saying it's no more or less destructive than taping used to be. In my last two posts, it seems, I viewed the controversy over a proposed British law through my American experience. The law would ban file sharers convicted of music piracy from the Internet. Apparently there's no controversy over whether file sharing's good or bad over there: both sides agree that it's bad. What they're arguing about is whether the file sharers should be banned from the Internet. So I misconstrued the real issue. So did Perez Hilton and any other American who took sides in the British brouhaha.
On one side, you have Radiohead, who post their albums online before they release them on CD (and now on LP), plus members of Pink Floyd and Blur. They form the core of the
Featured Artists Coalition. On the other, you have the British record industry, plus certain musicians who have taken it upon themselves to speak for the industry, including Lily Allen and James Blunt. On one side, you have moderates who believe that file sharing is harmful but file sharers shouldn't be given the Internet equivalent of the death penalty. On the other, you have the record industry and its corporate tools taking the extremist position that file sharing will kill the industry, and therefore file sharers should be banned — and the American record industry cartel, the RIAA, and its militant army of savage corporate lawyers add that they should be thrown in jail for decades and fined tens of thousands of dollars minimum. The issue is not whether file sharing should be tolerated, like in the US, where the two opposing positions are taken by the tech companies (for) and the record companies (against), with musicians taking one or the other extreme. In the UK, the issue is punishment: should it be lenient or draconian?
So I and my fellow Americans have been taking sides in the wrong controversy. Our controversy. We see RIAA allies Metallica and Garth Brooks attacking Napster back in 2000 whenever we hear Lily Allen making them look calm and rational in comparison. We Americans should remember, though, that the UK is not the US. Some of the rights and freedoms we take for granted here simply don't exist over there; some of them never did, which is why the American Founders and their successors established them in the first place. We were (and are) fighting against or for the RIAA over the definition of "free speech" as protected under the US Constitution; they're haggling over penalties, leaving the definition of file sharing as "piracy" unchallenged.
