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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zappo" data-source="post: 897278" data-attributes="member: 633">My two cents...First of all, there is (still) such a thing as fair use, despite all the efforts by the RIAA and the like to put an end to it.Average life of a CD is 5 years.If I want to backup my CDs, I can.If I want to record them on tape to listen in my car, I can.If I want to download them to my portable MP3 player, I can.If I have to break copy protections or download the songs from kazaa, I will.More to the current point, it isn't the first time that the RIAA does something like that. It likely won't be the last.They are breaking into private networks without any kind of authorization. This is so bad in so many ways that simple piracy pales in comparison. Unless a hard ruling is hammered down, we could very well find ourselves in a Cyberpunkish situation of anarchy fairly soon.If the RIAA can break into my computer because it strongly suspects that I'm illegally sharing files, then tell me what prevents me from breaking into your computer because I strongly suspect you've got an illegal copy of a D&D article I wrote 10 years ago? Or something equally prepoisterous?I'm waiting for the day when one of these hired guns inadvertantly does some serious damage to a corporate network. I guess that's what it will take for lawmakers to wake up.If I were the RIAA, I would stop wasting money on doing illegal stuff and invest on readying a web service to sell any song instantly in MP3 format, at any time, to anyone in the planet, for a reasonable price (say between 1$ and 2$). I already don't download songs because I hate having to waste my time wading through the sea of garbage and low-quality reproductions in P2P networks... and I don't buy CDs because 90% of the time I just want one song. I can't count the number of times I've heard a good song on an internet radio service and I thought "Damn... if only I could pay a couple euros and get it, NOW, at CD quality... damn RIAA, why are you wasting time with your obsolete thinking?"Use DRM if you must, as long as it allows for fair use. And if you can't do so, either screw DRM or make me pay substantially less, because then I'm no longer paying for a song which will last forever because I can backup it, but for a song which I can and will lose for a number of reasons.</blockquote>

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