by Kenneth Lawson

Created on: November 06, 2008   Last Updated: April 08, 2009

The following is a reprint of the blog article that I wrote for my personal Blog back on Saturday, October 13, 2007

Having read several of the posting here, I feel compelled to put in my thoughts on the issue. rather then rewite what I had already written and try to remember all of the points I made in he orginial article I thought it would be more to the point to post it here in this form, If you have any comemnts, questions feel free to let me know. The link to the blog is in my profile.

Open Letter to The RIAA

Until a few years ago I had never heard of the RIAA. Now it seems they've become the BIg Brother of the music world. And they're looking for a fight. I venture to say that most folks had never heard of the RIAA until the started suing everyone for doing something they've been doing doing for many years. Actually they didn't know it at the time. When I bought a record, (LP) You remember them? I would play it the first time and make a copy onto whatever tape machine I had at the time, cassette or 8 track and put the record away and save the record. If someone wanted a copy I'd either make a copy from the record or the tape, whichever was easiest at the time, that not counting all the mixed tapes with songs from different artist on it. Of courses we were using good 'ole RCA jacks and swapping cables back and forth.we were using the technology we've had for the last 60+ years, of course Until about 20 years or so, we had never heard of digital anything. Now everything is digital theses days.

There is a term in the entrainment industry called "fair use". I first read about it in connection to the early days of VCR. The studios had tried kill VCR and the courts had rejected the studio argument's saying that consumers had a limited right to use the VCR to time shift TV broadcast to a more convent time. I am not going to try to explain a very complicated subject, which I only have a broad and very basic understanding of the concept. Instead I will supply links at the bottom of the article to give you more detailed reading material.

The idea of this article is to try bring together the idea of protecting copyrighted material, and the individual consumers right to use the material as they see fit. It is generally accepted the one can make a couple copy's of a disc for back-up proposes. The question starts to be sticky when you try to give a copy to someone else. Is it just sharing a interesting work or stealing,?

In the early 1990's when the mp3 craze started and

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