In the physical world smaller businesses could offer music from a mainstream label just as easily as any Tower records just by ordering from a distributor, even if the small shop can’t hit the same pricepoint based on volume. The HUGE mainstream store often fails for the odd obscure side project of a band member or a specific soundtrack request that just happens to be on a major label, so small shops in the local area were there to help, often with someone who could build connections from that request into obscure independant music. Independant releases are the small shop’s bread & butter, but where’s Peter Gabriel’s Passion on Beatport or Bleep? Smaller online shops that tend to target ONLY their niche are great only if you’re already looking for something they offer, as otherwise how do you find them?

To a certain degree surfing XM and Online radio helps, but I have CD’s in my collection I’d never have found if I had to sit & listen through everything else in the same genre. And since many of the smaller ‘physical’ shops have disappeared over the last 5-10 years it’s not necessarily as easy to bump into that CD these days. 5 years ago Apple was still posturing themselves as the anti-DRM ‘good guy’ in the face of the evil MS ‘longhorn’ DRM that was making headlines. Funny that Apple happens to be in the driver seat now, and is also using DRM to slave their OS to Intel hardware to boot.

“Hey, read my hack-ass sci-fi novella for free (now translated in to Pirate Speak!), look at these pretty mouse ears made out of bendy straws, then revel in the absolutely astonishing amount of misinformation I spout about copyright, a subject on which I know suprisingly little, but still manage to make a living with. Look! I made a pirate cape out of Mickey Mouse ears, and published it under a Creative Commons license!”

Mr. Doctorow’s opinion means pretty much nothing to me, and I’ve long ago given up trying to sift fact from fiction in his lengthy ramblings on copyright. I mean, like, shit. Peter, if you’re gonna argue with someone, pick someone on your mental plane, at least. Picking a fight with Cory is like kicking a puppy. It’s fun for a minute, but eventually the neighbors are gonna call the SPCA.

I think the difference between you wrote and what Cory does is that you didn’t reference something trivial and lame from Disney World or shamelessly plug your own books in your article.

I see no advantage to the consumer or average person to have some centralized authority locking up our culture in a tight container and extracting a toll (tomorrow your blood? or your first born?). It’s called “The Totalitarian Tiptoe”. They say if you slowly turn up the heat on a frog in water, it won’t realize that it’s getting cooked until it’s too late. The name of the game is total control. Don’t make any mistake about it. They are patient and they will say anything to get that control. Rev 1 is still open. Rev 2 is more restrictive but still open. Rev 3 even more restrictive. Add in favorable legislation to redefine customers as criminals. Now maybe in Revision #4 it’s locked up tight and totally illegal. And now we have a few of the ingredients for tyranny and unrestricted abuse of monopoly power. Don’t forget to add in a multimillion dollar smear campaign to redefine normal people and normal terms as terrorists and criminals.

Everyone has to make their own choice on these issues. They lost me and my dollars, and if they take away all the alternatives by hook and crook then I’ll find another way to spend my time. You know right about now a long walk or bikeride in nature to reflect on the state of this world and society is sounding appealing.

And the technical issues are really vital, because they determine to what extent users can choose between DRM’ed and non-DRM’ed music, whether they’re locked into a player/delivery mechanism from a specific vendor, and how easy it is to choose non-DRM’ed music and alternative music vendors (online and off).

There was a time when the RIAA was the only part of the problem, but now I think it’s fair to say that the RIAA *and* Apple *and* Microsoft have become a problem. And they’re all benefiting from added control, whether or not music consumers and musicians are.

I don’t think evangelizing MS and Apple will work, but I’m not sure evangelizing the RIAA is going to do much good, either. I think the advocacy window is musical consumers and the musicians themselves. Musicians aren’t members of the RIAA, but they could, for instance, try to change the policies of groups that do represent musicians, like ASCAP. I think it should be possible to have strong copyright laws without handing over technological control to a few outlets, a move that’s unlikely to benefit musicians.