Daft Music Industry and Greedy Pigs

Sorry for the Harsh title, but I had to put it down.

In an on going terror campaign from the music industry upon its consumers, many people and a lot more companies have felt down as casualties because of the stupidity of this industry to not to be able to embrace the advent of the new technologies brought by the internet. This is so true in the light of the most recent event (December 2008) when the RIAA officially declared not being interested any more at bullying internet user suspected of SHARING music files.

An article published back in 2002 (R.I.P. Audiogalaxy) retrace the life and death of an internet music provider that had been forced to close down because of the same inability or the RIAA's members to change at the same pace as the technology. Here is an excerpt that is very interesting:

"[...] As most people with a clue realize, it is extremely hard to filter digital media. Unless you have a person sitting there listening to an mp3, you have no way of knowing that an mp3 titled "unsigned band - lame song.mp3" is actually nsync's latest hit. At first we had simple text matching, but users are obviously smart enough to figure out how to rename files in ways that make sense only to humans. After increasing pressure from the RIAA, we actually went to an extremely complex system based on a checksum digest of the first megabyte of an mp3.[...]"

This is fact quite impressive to read that upon receiving almost inconsistent batch of data from the different copyright holders to compare with the files transferred on the network, those guys actually manage to do anything at all. But the solution is even more impressive. A more logical solution would have been to create a unique master database for every single track existing and to have a unique identifier per track based on the actual sound. This is something that is implemented right now (Feb 2009) in many software solution and available for free for personal usage and possibly under some sort of commercial licensing scheme if someone needs.

I surely hope the people behind those investment decision in the music industry for the past ten years are getting fired as it is a similar case of public pressure as it did happened for the printing industry with Gutenberg.