OK, we need a bit of a discussion of the RIAA's lawsuit against individual file sharers. It has nothing to do with God, except that it's a great travesty of justice in every sense of the word. But I'll give God a break when it comes to this, unless of course he wants to destroy the RIAA immediately, in which case, go for it, God.
Just as an overview, the RIAA is suing around 1000 file sharers for "up to $150,000 for song", and getting the names of these file sharers from ISPs. In the past, damages per song have been closer to $15,000; let's see where that money goes. A song is made up of, usually 10-15 songs. Let's take the lower bound, so $150,000 would be the amount requested by the RIAA in damages from sharing a complete album. So, by sharing an entire album, I prevented the sale of roughly 10,000 copies of an album, according to the RIAA's figures.
From here we have two different paths, both of which lead to faulty conclusions. First, let's assume that everyone sharing this imaginary album could be sued by the RIAA. Since we've already assumed calculated that 10,000 people downloaded it from our first sharer, we now must estimate how often this gets shared. The RIAA says that 5% of file swappers share large numbers of copyrighted files, let's assume that 5% of these 10,000 would share this file. That makes 500 people, or liabiility of 5,000,000 albums in total.
Maybe some of you don't know that much about record sales, but when an album goes "platinum", it means it sold over 1,000,000 copies. Only 5% of all records go gold or platinum. Going quintuple platinum takes a real superstar record, to assume a loss of 5,000,000 records being sold is absolutely ridiculous, especially considering that there are only an estimated 10 million file sharers in America. So half of these people would have bought your record, but downloaded it instead and neglected to purchase it. Of course, not all pirates would purchase this music normally, which is a big assumption here.
Now, let's consider that the RIAA doesn't assume a 5,000,000 unit loss, and perhaps a more reasonable one. $150,000 would account for the loss of 10,000 albums. You could assume that 100,000 albums were unsold, which is still a small chunk of the pie when it comes to heavy hitting albums. Maybe this is reasonable. Still, with the numbers I assumed in the previous paragraph, $15 per album, 5% of sharers sharing large amounts, 10,000,000 file sharers, an unfair burden is being placed on this single user. Assuming that $1.5 million dollars are lost per album shared, distributed evenly among this 5% of 10,000,000, $150 should be charged. This is a bit unfair, based on my assumptions. Even if 1,000,000 copies were lost, only $1500 should be charged per album, hardly $15,000 per song. Of course, the RIAA doesn't get all of the money for every album. In reality, this amount should be even less.
The RIAA is trying to scare people into compliance by charging these incredible amounts, abusing clear flaws in copyright law. But the RIAA doesn't do anything other than make a very select few people rich and famous, and even then it takes a lot of people to buy into the quality of the artist at hand. Music can and is created for a very small price, and even promotion companies can be utilized for far less than the amount per album that record companies reap. This money is not necessary, talent scouts are not necessary. What is necessary is good music, word of mouth and good music journalism.
People will still purchase albums, look at sales of John Vanderslice's Mass Suicide Occult Figuriines, which you can download in its entirety from his website. I own a copy. Something about the recording industry's logic doesn't quite hold. The future of music is not in danger, but the future of the RIAA is.
Why should we the people, the supposed governing body of our nation, be subject to these ridiculous laws? We can change copyright law if we don't agree with it. If music won't be harmed, and recording artists for the most part make money off of their concerts rather than their recordings, who would hurt if sharing music files was legal? The RIAA. This is outrageous, and it needs to be changed.
