Send Them Your Money: A Campaign to Send The RIAA/MPAA Billions

Why don't we actually give the RIAA millions of dollars?

Like, the argument from all advocates of digital freedom isn't that artists don't need money to survive, but by making things simple and easy, people will quite willingly part with their money.

So why not solve this "chicken and egg" issue by hurling a few eggs their way to get the ball rolling?

Let's give them shitloads of money to prove that people will willingly pay for their product.

"It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs.

But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors.

It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance.

By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it.

Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society.

It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.

Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body.

Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea.

In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."

from, The Letters of Thomas Jefferson: 1743-1826

http://odur.let.rug.nl/usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl220.htm

If one was truly inclined to pay the artists who produced an album (or the equivalent in a different content industry), it would be best to send it to them directly. Then they'd realize (a la Louis CK) that the publishers are unnecessary middlemen in the creator/consumer relationship, thus obsolescing that entire segment of industry and the RIAA/MPAA with it.

I find the argument that copyright and patents appear only recently in historical terms unconvincing. Following that line of reasoning shoudln't we be even more wary of e.g. universal suffrage and civil rights laws?

Moreover, that these laws occured relatively late in human history is IMO unsurprising, even to be expected given the state of human evolution. At the risk dilettantism, here's what Wikipedia has to say about the history of "copyright":

> Copyright was invented after the advent of the printing press and with wider public literacy.

Whether or not one agrees with copyright law, I would argue that the relevant laws followed technological innovations at some lag -- and did not just appear randomly or as a result of some kind of conspiracy.

Wikipedia puts the original date for Patents at 500BC, but if you read a few sentences further the industrial revolution appears. So again, the argument applies: effort expended on legal action followed effort expended on technological process, at some lag.

And even if we look before the industrial revolution, and before the printing press, history provides us with a wealth of examples of groups of individuals trying to preserve or protect their "edge" in crafts (often acquired through hard work and ingenuity, sometimes, through fortune), techniques, or otherwise "patentable" methods, with often far higher consequences than what are being proposed currently. (Though, admittedly, that means nothing.) I'm thinking for example of guilds of various forms throughout Mideaval Europe, as well as China. My knowledge in this area is not that extensive, but there are a few colourful examples in "The Rise and Decline of Nations" by Mancur Olson, e.g. IIRC one guild in China collectively biting another master to death for taking on too many apprentices (copies!) for fashioning gold leaf -- gold leaf for the king (no less), whose protection was worth nothing to him in the face of the guild's desire to protect its "IP".

So I think a case can be made that IP of some form has been around for a long, long time; it's not some accident brought about by a single, poorly-written law. It's not a relatively recent, arcane (thus exploitable) area of justice. Mankind has been grappling with these issues, these tradeoffs, for as long as human progress has existed, and will presumably continue to do so at each "singularity". It's right and proper that we have this debate; it's right and proper that the creative industries demand a say in new technologies, insofar as those technologies depend on the transmission of creative works to be interesting and demanded.

> The RIAA's version of morality is not handed down from Heaven, you know: its rectitude is at least as questionable as its practicality.

Agreed, sadly, none in the filesharing camp has offered anything even remotely resembling morality. You tend to see something along the lines of "I'm not talking about morality, I'm just giving you reality etc" (followed by "want some of my cash? dance, bitch!").