My kids are big Richard Scarry fans, and one of their favorite books is a little paperback titled “Pie Rats Ahoy!” (Yes, these successors to Captain Hook are tiny rats who steal a pie from the seafaring hero.)
I thought of that punning title as I read the latest batch of headlines from the file-swapping wars. The RIAA and its member labels have now taken the final step (one I predicted nearly four years ago, as I recalled here) of declaring all-out war on the music fans who are their own best customers — and who have in recent years taken to file trading en masse because of the music industry’s price gouging and its pathetic reluctance to adapt to new technology.
As the RIAA slaps lawsuits on 12-year-old girls, while industry executives admit to the Wall Street Journal that they are unable to keep their own kids from trading MP3s, one of the most ludicrous figures being tossed around is the amount that the industry has supposedly lost thanks to piracy. A conservative guess by an analyst in the New York Times placed this number at $750 million. Music industry lobbyists have put the number in the billions.
These numbers are reminiscent of the old software-industry complaints about software piracy: They assume that each illegal copy of a program or a music file represents the loss of a sale — that if the alternative of piracy were not available, most or all of the pirated stuff would have been bought fair and square at full price. (By this logic, every time Free Republic members rip off Salon Premium articles and post them on their site, Salon could claim that every single Freeper reading them represents a loss of a $35 subscription fee.)
This is self-serving nonsense. First of all, it treats the digital realm — in which each additional copy costs essentially nothing to make and does not limit the original’s availability to its owner — as if it were the physical realm, where copying carries costs and stealing involves depriving the original owner of his goods. Even more importantly, it ignores the essentially transitory nature of much or most file-sharing — which music lovers use to sample music, to see whether they like it, and frequently just to listen once or a handful of times. Each download does not and cannot represent a lost sale. But the record labels have an incentive to artificially overstate the size of the pie-slice that online piracy has cut out, and they have done so with all the scurrying zeal — and comical ineffectiveness — of Richard Scarry’s rats.
I get all my online music these days legally from the great Emusic service. But back in the days of Napster I used the software to listen to bands I’d heard about and see whether I liked them. I bought more CDs as a result. This year for the first time in my life I have consciously decided to cut my music purchases way back. I won’t support the pie rats!
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