(Or, Quantitative Easing at the RIAA)
After years of a mostly fruitless “war on piracy,” the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has made some recent moves that seem to indicate a shift in their strategy on copyright infringement:
- As reported in the Wall Street Journal (and then everywhere), the RIAA is discontinuing its practice of suing individuals accused of illegal file sharing, but have asked Internet service providers to begin capping bandwidth to suspected file sharers — cutting off their supply line, as it were.
- The announcement from Spotify of a free, easy to use streaming music player endorsed by major record labels (including EMI, Warner Music, and Sony BMG), which promises a massive library of on-demand (and presumably ad-supported) music.
- A new arrangement between record labels and Apple’s iTunes Music Store which will offer its downloadable music free of digital rights management (DRM) technology by spring of 2009 (though at increased price, and still in an AAC format that isn’t compatible with older music players).
While none of these indicates that the RIAA is running up a white flag of surrender, each seems aimed at amnesty: welcoming the pirates back into port.
The strategy is two-pronged: first, flood the market with easy, cheap (or free!) legitimate means of accessing digital media (think, in addition to Spotify and DRM-free iTunes, of Hulu, and streaming Netflix, and the recent changes on YouTube); then also create impediments and disincentives for procuring the media through other (illegitimate) channels. (Of these, only the former is a new strategy; the latter has been practiced by the RIAA for years, albeit awkwardly.)
[To put it all another way: it's as if the RIAA is engaged in its own version of the "quantitative easing" that's going on now at the Fed: put more legitimate media into the market, and make the alternatives comparatively less profitable.]