Why does the music industry hate their customers?

So now the music industry is going after sites that share guitar tabs. The issue is that the industry feels that their copyrights are being violated by these sites. Perhaps - while I think this would fall under "fair use," I'm also no lawyer so I'm not really any sort of authority to judge this. But even if they are technically within their rights to shut down these sites (or at least remove the tabs), it is utter insanity and stupidity of them to do so.

The main problem I have with this is that it seems to serve no useful purpose. If this were making a serious dent in a real business, I'd feel otherwise. But I know from personal experience as a guitar player that there is precious little tab that is formally published by the industry; outside the most mainstream of music and the biggest hits, 99% of bands/albums/songs are simply unavailable to purchase from the copyright holder. So it's hard for me to accept any claim of economic harm that would arise from sharing what you figure out if there's no "legal" alternative. And even when songs are published, a pathetically high percentage of these books are "simplified" and are thus not at all useful to figure out how to play the song.

If the music industry published "as played" tabs for each song that they publish on a CD, that would be wonderful and I'd be arguing that the tab sites are a problem. And in fact, when I want to learn how to play something that is beyond my abilities to figure out, the first thing that I do is buy the tab if it is available. But they don't. Why? Because it's not economically viable to publish very many tabs. Which I think proves my point that they're not suffering any harm from these tab sharing sites: after all, if the market doesn't justify publishing more than a few tab books, then isn't the "problem" of guitarists sharing what they've figured out really a purely academic one?

But I find this disturbing on other levels as well.

First off, where is the line? If I figure out how to play a song (which I often do), am I violating copyright? If I show a friend in person, have I broken the law? What if I write it down and mail it to them? And if those are OK, why can't I post it on a bulletin board - is it really only a question of scale, that 1:1 communication is fine but public communication is where the line is crossed? Good commentary on this at http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13841. And what if I just do, say, the guitar solo in the middle of the song. Wouldn't that be covered by fair use? What about just the overall chord progression, minus all the details/solos/etc.?

I really wonder why the music industry hates their customers. I think they really do - there are numerous examples of where the industry works to prevent its customers from doing perfectly legitimate things (from a copyright law perspective) in order to prevent a few illegal things. Want examples?

• Exhibit A, in my opinion, is the whole Sony Rootkit incident; this is a poster child for hating your customers.
  
• Another example is the industry's pet legislation, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which sure seems to me to censor free speech and makes technically illegal the ripping of your DVD's to your computer. I have absolutely no intention of sharing DVD-based movies, but the fact that I can't rip them to my hard drive so that I don't have to muck with the plastic disc is irritating and insane - how on earth does doing that violate copyright law? In buying the DVD, I've bought the right to watch the movie; why does the medium matter so much? They're treating me like a baby, assuming I'm going to share it, and inconvenience me as a result.
  
• Overall, look at how grudgingly the music industry came over to legal internet distribution - and they still have onerous copy protection that is not interoperable between different devices. If you buy from iTunes, you've lost your music if you ever want to use something from someone other than Apple. How is that consumer friendly? If you buy a song, seems to me that you've bought the right to listen to that song wherever you want. (Heck, if you buy the CD or a record or a cassette, that's certainly the case. You just have to lug the physical medium around. Yuck.) The music industry's behavior clearly says to me that given the choice between making $100 in revenue and losing 5% to piracy or making $150 in revenue and losing 20% to piracy, they would choose the first option. (Do the math if you want to see why this is a bad idea). And they wonder why their sales are falling.

Anyhow, back to guitar players.

Guitar players learn how to play from other guitar players; the Internet has made it so much easier for musicians to learn to be better musicians, which should lead to better music being made (which we sorely need). What purpose is possibly served by quashing that?

Lots of bands cover songs, even in public performances. Technically, this is also illegal, but it's something that's rarely enforced except for the biggest acts. I get, though, why the industry would want to enforce this: if a band is making money on someone else's song, well, that's pretty much exactly what copyright law was designed to address; it doesn't get more clear cut than that, in my opinion.

Learning how to play a song is not the same as performing it publicly or sharing an MP3 that you ripped, any more than reading the script to Star Wars is the same experience as seeing the movie. And in this case, you're not even publishing the script, you're publishing your synopsis of the plot, albeit with as much detail as you can.

I think that this is a bad battle for the music industry to pick.

TSA - do we expect perfection?

I think the latest "no-liquids" restrictions imposed by the TSA are ridiculous. Two things have been pointed out a thousand times before, but I think they sum things up well, albeit not completely:
a) The TSA seems to focus on the terrorist's *last* strategy, and
b) The foiled plot in Britain just proves further that intelligence and surveillance are vastly more effective than security at the checkpoint. (After all, how hard would it be to smuggle some vials of liquid or ziplock bags through security?).

Frankly, I think that the ban on liquids (assuming that this is a new permanent reality) is crazy and will do nothing to enhance our actual security in the skies - it (and other security measures) merely adds costs, inconvenience, and delay to travelers, making commercial air travel progressively more miserable. It may cause the bad guys to look for other mechanisms (though I doubt it), and it may just move them to other tactics.

People have said this in satire, but unfortunately it's true: the only way to achieve true security in the skies is to stop letting people fly. The logical conclusion here for Al Queda is to train folks in the gym, making them incredibly muscular. Put 5 of them on an airplane to overwhelm and subdue the crew, and then kick out a window. Pure muscle. I bet it could be done, and the only way to prevent that would be to ban anybody that is strong. It's ridiculous.

We seem to expect the TSA to achieve 100% in providing security. I can't think of any system that has ever achieved that, much less a government one. But I'll make a controversial assertion if only to stir some thinking: I think it is better for us to have a freer society, easier air travel, and what I'll call "98% security" than have an increasingly paranoid, security-obsessed, invasive, and inconvenient society that has 98% security but the illusion of 100% security. OK, ok, so I phrased that in a loaded way, but let me distill it to its more controversial corollary: I think it's not the end of the world for us to suffer the occasional terrorist attack. (Note to the NSA: I am *not* advocating terrorism!)

After all, every big city in America suffers from murders, yet we as a society far more rational about that: we don't avoid a living in a city just because it has had murders, we actually celebrate how safe cities like NYC have become when their murder rates have decreased. We monitor the murder rate and work to drive it down, but nobody expects that somehow we can achieve a 0% murder rate, and nobody would be willing to make the tradeoffs that would be required to achieve that (no weapons, lots of surveillance, lots of loss of privacy, etc.) I think that's the right tradeoff. As a result, the odds today of being murdered in the US still greatly outweigh the odds of being killed by a terrorist. And yet there seems to be no limit to what we'll spend or what we'll do to eliminate the risk of a terrorist attack.

Somewhere in a cave somewhere, Bin Laden is laughing his ass off. He realizes that he did it all wrong: he doesn't have to have his followers kill themselves, all they have to do is feint this way or that and get caught and the whole system gets thrown into chaos and another billion dollars gets spent chasing the unachievable "perfect security," and the whole Western population lives in more and more of a police state.

Welcome to Clear Cool Head

I don't consider myself a political person. I only recently gave my first donation ever to a political campaign. My conservative friends think I'm liberal, my liberal friends think I'm conservative. I think of myself as moderate, and try to avoid ideology where possible. That doesn't mean I don't have principles or strong beliefs about right and wrong, just that I think a lot of political thought has predictable knee-jerk reactions to things, and they start from the answer and put on the blinders to the fact that that answer may not be the best one.

I have no political background, I have no particular qualifications to be blogging in the political space whatsoever. And I'm probably full of shit most of the time - I recognize that, and if you think so, please tell me so. But there are things I think need to be said, usually where I think ideology is getting in the way of rational approaches to the problems we all face. That's why I called this "clearcoolhead" - in the hope that cooler heads /clearer thinking can produce a useful discussion/result. Hopefully this will be at least a bit interesting.