I never believe that one need question the concept of state-sponsored private ownership of publicly-performed intellectual property itself to create the world in which a sharing culture overtakes the dinosaurs of the intellectual property past. A fountain of new content creators, armed with new technology and CC/open source/GNU/PD creations, can work in
a single generation a change that will revolutionize music and the arts for the future, without changing a word of current copyright law. The fight at the ramparts, I believe, is not even the ill-advised copyright extension acts (though they need repeal), but instead to ensure that new things don’t creep in the back-door to bar content creators from free and open distribution. If enough content creators share enough material through liberal licensing and PD, then we’ll all profit, and the world will change.

In my view, to pirate conventional record industry material is entirely counter-productive (I almost typed ‘counter-revolutionary’) because even the act of piracy bestows upon those works a cachet that they don’t deserve. I buy conventional record label things, and I’m not a purist by any means. But I recognize-and try to practice–that if we are to create this sharing culture it must be not only as ‘creators’ but as listeners and promoters.

The ramparts we must storm are not to win the hollow rights to sample from dinosaurs. We must instead create our own catapults, and breach the hegemony of the music industry with new artists we listen to instead of their offerings.

So a lot of what Sitaker states flags the issue well. Yet even within the current legislative regime, we can simply create new material, on our new technology, and watch the RIAA become an irrelevance.

To me, therefore, the major issue is not “political” in the traditional sense–but cultural. We have before us the chance to create an entirely new and satisfying culture of the arts. Rather than worry about language of confrontation, I’d rather be about the business of creating–and listening.
Every time I download from a netlabel and find myself enrapt, another
RIAA company loses the price of a CD. Every time I exchange samples with a fellow music hobbyist, the RIAA hegemony on how to experience music fades.