The RIAA wants your ISP to make you pay a piracy fee

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By Philip DiStefano

In 2007, The Consumerist Web site held a series of online polls to find America’s worst company. Coming in second place was Halliburton, with 6,931 votes. So who was first? Here’s a hint: It’s the same company that wants to make your Internet Service Provider charge a piracy fee on your monthly Internet bill. Give up?

Why, it’s the Recording Industry Association of America – the RIAA, of course. Coming in at 8,079 votes, the “Worst Company in America 2007” wants to make everyone who pays for a connection to the Internet pay a fee of about $5 a month to compensate for lost revenues due to online music piracy, according to Wired.com.

They’re not concerned if you actually pirate music online. They want the fee to be applied to everyone, once again making the good pay for the bad – a situation made even worse when you account for the fact that the “bad” is highly debatable.

Many technology enthusiasts and even Joe Schmoes don’t see downloading music from peer-to-peer networks on the Internet as a bad thing for many reasons. Some believe that record labels rip off artists anyway, and the only true way to support an artist is to attend their concerts. Others believe it’s ethical since no physical asset is actually being lost.

Ethics aside, though, the practice of acquiring music from peer-to-peer networks is currently illegal because of American copyright laws. If you think the RIAA will never get away with something like this, something that seems so unfair to all … well, think again.

The idea of charging a piracy fee to all users regardless of what they actually do with their product or service is not new. Do you have a Microsoft Zune? If so, you’ve paid a fee to Universal Music when you purchased it, because they assume all consumers of the Zune will use the device for piracy, and Microsoft actually agreed to this.

In Canada, there is a levy on blank, writable CDs that goes to the Canadian recording industry every time a Canadian consumer purchases such writable media. No matter what you do in Canada with your blank CD-R, even if you just back up your documents on it, you’ve paid a fee to the recording industry.

This trend of companies abusing their consumers is not very comforting. If the RIAA were to actually get their request and have the piracy surcharge put onto consumers’ Internet Service Provider bills, this would set a disturbing precedent for other organizations wishing to monetize on this piracy scare.

After all, what’s to stop the Motion Picture Association of America from trying to take from everyone what they’ll surely think is their cut for the online piracy of movies?

Send your comments to editor@tigerweekly.com

Originally Published: Issue 601 - March 26, 2008

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