Nate Anderson of Ars Technica offers an awesome point-by-point dismissal of RIAA CEO Cary Sherman’s cry-baby op-ed.
Imagine that you have a friend who wants to clean the public golf course of chipmunks by dumping rat poison by the bucketful from helicopters. You think this is a… misguided idea. But the friend has the ear of the town council and convinces one member to introduce a bill mandating mass quantities of arsenic to be dumped on the golf course. You show up to a hearing and suggest the poison could cause other problems. The friend then goes to a local newspaper and for months trashes your good name, suggesting that you are a dishonest scumbag who furthermore likes the golf course chipmunks and probably profits from them by selling them to research labs by the minivan load. For what it’s worth, the friend suggests that you also support killing the town’s seniors with tainted heart medication imported from abroad.
These jackasses still don’t get it. Do you know why Apple’s iTunes succeeded in the face of piracy? Because they made it easier to just buy the content. They treated customers like, well, paying customers. Idiots like the RIAA and MPAA would rather treat their paying customers like criminals. Instead of making content easy to enjoy, they would rather wrap it in DRM or require distribution through bullshit like UltraViolet.
If these companies want to succeed in selling their increasingly awful music and unimaginative movies, then they should stop punishing those who support their industry for the acts of people who were never going to buy in the first place. Steve Jobs was right - these people still have their heads stuck up their collective asses.