62 Let free music files ring
Tuesday 13th March, 2007
Richard Stallman has written a short article for the Boston Globe about file sharing.
The record companies, seeking to bully people who share music, have demanded that colleges identify students who share. They use smear terms such as "piracy" and "theft" that imply sharing is wrong. Don't believe it. Sharing is friendship; to attack sharing is to attack the basis of society.
Well, we all know that most musicians get almost nothing from the record companies. In fact, the record companies almost seem like drug pushers, the way they pay just enough to maintain the artists' dependency on them.
"Authors own their books and license them to publishers. When the contract runs out, writers gets their books back. But record companies own our copyrights forever."
Courtney Love
Back to Richard Stallman:
The real solution is to legalize sharing. This won't affect the record companies much, but if they did go out of business, we could rejoice that they can no longer threaten anyone.
They pay zero cents of your CD purchase price to musicians (except for superstars), so the absence of these companies would be no loss to society.
Hear, hear.