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A 12-year-old girl browses
the stacks in a music store, finds a recording she likes, and slips
it in her pocket. It was easy and CDs are insanely expensive, so
she does it again. And again and again, until she has a pile of
over 1,000 disks. Millions of other people do the same, and the
music industry reports sales declines of 10 percent a year.
When the girl is caught the
story makes national headlines. The United States Senate gets in
the act, holding showy hearings – not to address the chronic theft
problem but to scold the music business. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.,
asks an industry executive whether he was “headed to junior high
schools to round up the usual suspects,” while a lawyer accuses
another executive of carrying out a “campaign against 12-year-old
girls.”
Yes, we can be softheaded on
crime and CDs are arguably overpriced, but United States senators
rushing to the aid of shoplifters? It really happened, except the
part about the CDs.
When the Recording Industry
Association of America filed suit against 261 industrial-strength
Internet music pirates this month, the Washington Post and other
media reported it bagged one Brianna LaHara, a 12-year-old Manhattan
honor student. The other 260 desperados included a 71-year-old
grandfather, several teenagers, and a professor at Yale University.
Each are accused of providing over 1,000 copyrighted songs stored on
their computers to users of the so-called file-sharing websites they
had used to swipe the tunes in the first place.
A number of senators and a
chorus of social pundits are shocked, shocked the music industry
would object to being ripped off, much less do something about it.
It’s not that they haven’t tried; Congress has been lobbied for
meaningful federal enforcement since at least 2000 when heavy metal
Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich struck an odd-couple vibe with
fellow hipster and recording artist Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. I
doubt Hatch’s recordings chew up much bandwidth on the file-sharer’s
hit parade, but he did seem to feel the rocker’s pain.
Still, not much was done. The music industry launched
public relations campaigns and took action against several
file-sharing services, notably shutting down Napster, the granddaddy
of them all. Similar websites sprouted up faster than they could be
weeded out, and after years of chest thumping and bluster the RIAA
has finally gone after the thieving public.
Some defendants claim to be
unaware the software they use to pilfer music on the Internet also
allows others to poke around their hard drives for tunes to steal.
Most were surprised to find RIAA used that same software to detect
“egregious uploaders” like themselves. Many, of course, say they
didn’t know stealing music was illegal.
I understand no one will
sleep better because Brianna LaHara is off the streets. She isn’t
particularly menacing, and her case was the first RIAA settled;
Internet scuttlebutt has it RIAA was hot to end their suit given the
rap they were getting for declining to make exceptions for cute
kids. The child does appear genuinely apologetic, and promises not
to do it again.
More to the point, RIAA has
learned how quickly some politicians and others rationalize crime if
they are unlikely to become its victim. Few of us make a living
from intellectual property, copyrighted material created for the
purpose of earning a buck, so our wallets don’t feel the bite.
Combine that lack of personal risk with a weak moral compass and you
have a license to steal.
Lawsuits are about the worst way to settle anything,
with the possible exception of dueling. Yet as long as no one is
willing to put teeth in the law or enforce the ones we have, it’s
hard to fault the music industry for trying to survive an epidemic
of theft, even by grandpas and cute kids.
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