Maybe you’ve seen this posted a couple of times, from Washington Post:

Sony BMG’s chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, testified that “when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Copying a song you bought is “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy,’” she said.

Well, I think this is just one spokesperson who spoke herself into her foot. Anyway, even if RIAA and the big recording industry is suddenly changing their policy, there’s so much from past related to them supporting this activity so that any attempts to change their policies will be tough. Unless they get the congress behind them, which I doubt.

Anyway, even if they got this into a low, how could they keep track of millions, not not speak of billions of users?

It’s very simple, digital material could be cloned as much as you want. The only way is to make consumers willing to provide money for music. Law enforcement and digital protection tools are always doomed to fail.

If there’s one more thing I hope to happen next year is that the music industry will finally get in tune with the consumers. We like DRM-free material, and also don’t like someone keeping track of what we do behind our backs.

I really don’t care how this is done, by a tax on CDs or ISPs compensating artists, eMusic style services, iTunes, and so on. But something consumer-friendly is better than what the five five are trying to achieve just now — give up your old and non-working ideas.