Killing off the little guy (this time it's internet radio)

[zyqwert]

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Wouldn't it make sense to protect the value of the time and resources spent on creative works?

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How far are you willing to go?

It was easy to offer that protection when copying was expensive. A would-be copyright infringer had to build a record pressing plant, buy raw materials, copy the record (imperfectly since his source is analog), ship the records, and distribute the records to consumers in stores.

When the copyright owner catches this guy, he is easy to punish with the copyright law. You can take lots of real goods from the guilty. The infringer has significant fixed costs at risks, and non-trivial marginal costs. There is a market price and enforcement level where it is worth it to create a black market, but records in the US were never priced there.

Now, in a digital age, what are the fixed and marginal costs of reproduction? Close to zero in both cases. So, absent the protection of the law, the market price would become close to zero. The actual market price is $0.99/song.

With no barriers to entry and very low probability of getting caught you need huge enforcement to prevent the existence of a black market. For distributors, anonymous secret (secure) sharing is existing technology that can be used to counter the obvious enforcement mechanisms, so I doubt any enforcement strategy can make the probabilty of getting caught very high.

The law enforces a market price of $0.99/song for a product that anybody can distribute for about $0.02/song. The disparity begs for competitors. The black market will be very strong, regardless of what the government does.

The RIAA appreciates the economics, but assumes copyright enforcement as a given. So, to attempt to balance the equations, they work towards infinite enforcement:

1. Blank media taxes far more than the cost of the media.
2. Shotgun lawsuits that often target innocent people.
3. Pushing the enforcement problem onto others so a significant % of your new computer's resources will be wasted protecting RIAA IP.

Actually, DRM isn't really about preventing copyright infringement. The real purpose is to end fair use which allows you to move your purchases between media. The RIAA wants you to purchase your music collection again every time a new format becomes popular.

The RIAA wants to go quite far to protect their copyrights. They'd like to spy on the packets going through your ISP. They like taxing people on the assumption that they will infringe, without any evidence. They want every technology to get design approval from them. They are fighting a battle against a law of economics and they are willing to sacrifice your money, freedom, and privacy to fight it.

There is a limit to how much I'm willing to spend to protect copyrights, and the RIAA is way past it.