RIAA: Enemy of Ecommerce

[mandy]

At the root, you have an organization that is trying to, in effect, change U.S. laws as it pertains to online transactions – laws that are already on the books when you consider the way the music business operates offline. Two sterling examples of this can be found within the practices of Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the aforementioned efforts by the RIAA to impose stiff royalty rates on streaming audio content providers...

If you go to a store and buy a CD, you own that disc. You can play it on any CD player that you choose, you can burn a backup copy for yourself, and you can even turn around and resell it to a secondary merchant. Even going back to the cassette tape, 8-track and all the way to vinyl, this is the way that the industry has operated, and it’s been a successful system.

Now, let’s look at online merchants such as the iTunes music store. If you buy a track from iTunes, you can only play it within the iTunes program, or on your iPod. That’s it. You can’t make another copy of it, and you can’t listen to it on any other type of portable device, all because the RIAA thinks this is the way it should work “online” – a stance that is completely counterintuitive to the model that has been the backbone of the music industry for decades...

full article: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/0...ic-enemy-1