Reply #37: Rights consumed by the RIAA

[Resistance Is Futile]

The wonderful people at the RIAA have decided that we the people shouldn't have:

1) The right to listen to music at a time and place of one's choosing on a playback device of one's choosing. Space and time shifting are recognized rights. The RIAA has made many efforts, both legal and technical, to prevent customers from playing music on any device other than a CD player from any medium other than the original disk.

Among other efforts, the RIAA sued (and lost) in an attempt to block the sale of the first stand-alone solid state MP3 player. The RIAA has also expended considerable effort in developing anti-use technologies to prevent CDs from being played by computers or stand-alone devices which use CD-ROM derived mechinisms. This ammounts to an effective confiscation--theft--of legitimately purchased and legitimatly used equipment.

2) The right to listen to music that has not been RIAA approved. The RIAA has made several efforts to purchase legislation aimed at banning the sale of devices capable of playing music which does not have an embedded RIAA digital signature.

3) The right to pay a fair price, as determined by the market, for goods sold. The RIAA has been documented to engage in price fixing to artificially inflate its revenues.

4) The right for artists to recive a fair wage, as determiend by the market, in return for their labor. RIAA companies do not pay a fair wage and in many cases engage in creative accounting so that artists must pay the record labels rather than vice versa.