Anti-Climacus

LINK: interesting post on the consequences of the rise of the iPod:

"It means that music downloaders are being joined by a new demographic; professionals who like to think of themselves as law-abiding, people who own shares, people who vote. In short, people with clout. As opposed to frightened twelve year olds.

Because whichever way the music industry wants to cut it, and whichever model the fawning IT industry chooses to interact with them, music prices are set way too high, and artificially too high. Be it iTunes or Janusonline music is being (or will be) sold/rented for more than most people are prepared to pay. And let’s not even get into the negative privacy and security externalities of technical measures to protect the music industry’s copyright. Because somehow I don’t see the disadvantage or harm to consumers of invasive and inefficient rights protection technologies being built into content-pricing. Prices are patently more than the market is willing to bear (a dollar a song? 10 - 20+ dollars a month to ‘rent’ your music collection?), but the music industry has responded by criminalising its consumers.

Except that now, thanks to iPod, more and more of the consumers who download their music and are fed up of being ripped off are stroppy, articulate, well-connected professionals. These people really don’t like being called criminals and they can hire lawyers if someone tries it. Hell, plenty of them are lawyers themselves."