I may be British but I believe this might affect all of us.
If you are an American citizen and you buy a compact disc tomorrow, be very careful what you do with it because the Recording Industry Association of America is watching you. The RIAA have got guys posted on top of the largest structures on Earth with frighteningly powerful telescopes watching your every step. They’ve got spyware clambering through the broadband cables checking all your PC movement. And they’ve got terrifying justice droids waiting to be unleashed upon your soft malleable flesh if you dare to copy that CD to your computer.
Yes lawfully buying a CD and copying the songs onto your MP3 player is a crime. Apparently when you buy a CD, you own that physical copy but not the media on it. Therefore if you copy the music to your computer you are committing a heinous crime; you’re effectively depriving a poor helpless record company executive that golden toilet seat he wants for his 300 foot yacht and for that you will feel the full force of the RIAA’s mechanized law upholders. And heaven help those who might share the CD with a friend or family. They’ll probably be strung up by their intestines and beaten like the media thieving piñatas they are. Think of the executives. Think of their wealth. If nothing else think of their yachts.
It worries me because I’ve been donating unwanted games, music and books to charity shops for some time. But will it turn out that I only owned the physical products but not the media within them? Will I be hunted down for this and beaten within an inch of my life and told I should have hoarded all those books, games and music in the colossal mansion that I must own or the warehouse space that until now had remained a mystery to me? Or should I have just had it recycled into a golden toilet seat?
More importantly, if I ever find myself in the position of giving mouth to mouth resuscitation to a dying man/woman/girl/boy, should I just keep the breath inside my own lungs? I mean I really don’t know if I own the complete rights to the air that I breathe. Heaven help me if I ever passed it on to someone else before paying a ‘suit’ for the royalties to it.
And also I have many pets that get constant delight in the little titbits I give to them after a hearty meal but I may only hold the rights to the actual product and not the ingredients, so they’re going to have to go without from now on, unless they want poor Muramusu to waste away in prison.
This might only be the RIAA saying these things at the moment but I’m sure executives from industries all around the globe are wringing their hands in glee right now. Because depending on what the outcome of this is, a lot of fat cats might be adding golden toilet seats to their shopping lists quite soon.
Let’s all take a deep breath and hope sanity wins out in this instance but be careful where you exhale.
