A New Year's Resolution for Rick Boucher

Fair Use needs to be codified into law. Period. News that the RIAA is claiming in court that even copying a CD to your computer is piracy spread like wildfire across the Net, even popping up on the political blogs that I read.

Obviously, most sane people are saying this is ridiculous. Unfortunately, it's not wrong, legally. While it is generally accepted that making a backup copy of your music is okay, that's not a legal definition. It falls under this notion of "fair use," which is a nebulous concept that is NOT defined by law. That's a problem.

Of course, this may have been a result of someone within the RIAA legal team getting off-message. Consider if:

• they were serious about going after personal digital copies of paid-for CDs
• you consider the precedent of the legal actions against file-sharing networks, where the decisions hinged on the primary purpose of those networks facilitating piracy
• you think about how the default option when you insert a music CD into a computer is often a dialog box that asks you if you want to "import" that CD into iTunes

Then you necessarily have to conclude that iTunes is just as illegal as Napster, and while Doug Morris at Warner might welcome that particular fight, I don't think the industry as a whole would look forward to it.

Meanwhile, some organizations are fighting back against the heavy-handed tactics of the recording industry. Which is wholly different from being the music industry, and that needs to be pointed out more often.