If I were to ask you to compile a list of things or causes that are completely fruitless, you’d probably have a moderately different list from other people. You might think Kevin Federline is totally useless, while somebody else might appreciate what he’s done for celebrity magazines and the party scene in Los Angeles. While one person might think the NFL’s Pro Bowl is just an excuse to send athletes to Hawaii where they could get seriously injured, another person could argue how the game promotes such novel ideas as football in February or Astroturf. But I bet if I were to channel my inner Bob Ryan (the “legendary” Hollywood producer, not the Boston Globe columnist) and ask “If I told you that you could download popular music from the Internet at no cost, would that be something you’d be interested in?” chances are, not too many people would tell me I was preposterous.
Unless of course you happen to be the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) or the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), both of whom have recently intensified their battle against online piracy by suing 8,000 people in an effort to curb the overwhelmingly popular act of illegal music downloads. While it is understandable that these agencies are trying to recover billions of dollars lost to programs such as Kazaa or Napster, they’ll never get behind the eight ball in terms of how to fix things, which is why they’ll continue to sue the average Joe with no tangible results in sight.
The biggest problem that the RIAA and IFPI face is that they were late to the online music party, so to speak. How the entire entertainment industry was unable to anticipate a fusion between the Internet and its media is completely baffling. By the time it realized that the future of its economic model might be headed for disaster, Napster had caused roughly 80 percent of external traffic on the servers of many college residence halls to be taken up by music downloads. As a result of media consumers’ ability to realize this potential before the producers, downloading content expanded so quickly that everybody who stood to lose from it wasn’t able to reel it back in. The cat was out of the proverbial bag, and she set to work quickly on having litter after litter of kittens.
The end result has been that the laws in place to prevent the pirating of movies and music have been relatively ineffective – evidenced by both the continuing legal action taken by the recording industry and the continual downloading of media via various loopholes available to downloading services that spawn the aforementioned suits.
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