RIAA: more to chew on

Zeek @ Newsforge has put up an amazing article about who the pirates really are, us or the RIAA?

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

In his article, Zeek brings up a salient point. If all the fuss is about licensing and having the proper license to view and copy a product you bought, then why does that not carry over to the new format when it is released?

A few years ago that answer was easy. The new format was genuinely new because it offered better qualty or more portability.

vinyl --- 8 track --- cassete tapes --- compact disc ---mini-disc --- online download.

Now that we are in that final stage where the quailty has reached it's zenith, we are now hearing more talk of "licensing." That when you buy a CD, what you are actually buying is the license to listen to that product. Only now we are playing our music on machinery that requires you to not buy anything. You don't put a cd in an ipod. So now their frantic. mostly because people are starting to realize they've been ripped off for years with cd's and they have stopped buying.

This is much like the oil industry where you have a large spike in the price of crude oil so your gas tank becomes much more expensive to fill. Yet when that crude oil price goes down, your gas prices does not decrease in the same ratio it had increased, it stays relatively the same. The same can be said for cd's. The manufacturing has gotten much less expensive since the early days of cd's. I think it costs less than a quarter to produce one today. Yet, the price of cd's has stayed the same. The only cheaper cd's are found in Best Buy's and Circuit City's, because their warehouse business model allows the volume of sales to supercede the per unit profit. The same is not true for smaller cd stores who still must sell them at $15.00 to $18.00 as oppose to $10.00-$13.00 at Best Buy.

They are chickens looking for their heads before all of their blood (profits) splurge away.