Well, the copyright/RIAA police have another law to throw at fans: two fans of one of my very favorite artist, Ryan Adams, are currently being prosecuted for leaking a few of the songs off of his album Jacksonville City Lights. This is the first prosecution from the new law that makes it a seperate, distinct crime to leak copyrighted material before the copyright holder does.
So here it is…my plea to Ryan: This is insanity. I can’t imagine that you, the actual author of these works, want these fans to go to jail for potentially 11 years for sharing your music. Pressure your label to drop the suit, apologize for the inconvenience, and let these guys off the hook.
EDIT: Wired also has a followup, with some links to fan site discussions.
2 replies on “Come on, Ryan….”
The thing is, it’s usually the recording company, not the artist, who is the decision-maker in these things. A lot of these sorts of property rights are “use-it-or-lose-it” – if you don’t prosecute everybody who infringes, you lose the ability to prosecute any of them. In the US, later infringers can use the argument that you didn’t prosecute earlier infringers as a valid defense for infringing. So a lot of these strange seeming cases (prosecutions that seem to be against the artsts’ own interests, SNL fighting against the sort of publicicty that made thei rclips popular to begin with) is because they can’t let specific infringing uses slide without tacitly giving their ok for any later infringements in the eyes of the courts.
I completely understand this.
Which is why I think that the artist themselves should be using alternative licensing schemes like the Creative Commons in order to allow sharing, but non-commercial use, of their works.
I’m suggesting that Ryan step up against his label, and let them know this is a stupid way to maintain a fanbase. I stopped buying Metallica years ago for this very reason…I don’t want to stop buying Ryan as well.