Recording Industry Doesn't Even Have To Sue To Carry Out Agenda
from the chilling-effects dept
Another scary story from Ed Felten: It seems a company developing a multi-player game killed a feature that would let characters create music, fearing reprisals from record labels over copyright infringement. This is what it has come to now: The litigious and chilling atmosphere created by the recording industry has led to situations where people are afraid to enable perfectly legal music-making out of the (not that unreasonable) fear of getting sued for their customers' possible making of copyrighted music. Felten highlights the slippery slope here with the analogy that these virtual instruments are basically the same as real-world synthesizers, which are widely used to play music both copyrighted and not. This gives me a great idea for dealing with the upstairs neighbor's annoying 80's-cover-band rehearsals. The next time he keeps us up with his repetitive synthesizer riffs, we'll just call the RIAA.
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Recording industry
May be by 2010, we need to pay royalty to 20th century or oxford everytime we use a word other than a, an or the.
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music
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Copyrighting a single note
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