EFF vs RIAA

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I feel obliged to point to the EFF petition asking Congress to step in and stop the RIAA, in case any of you want to sign it.

On the other hand, I also feel obliged to note that I won't be signing it, partly because it uses the same kind of disingenuous "do it for the children!" overblown rhetoric that I loathe in other calls to political action. "We stand with the retirees, parents, children and others who have been caught in the RIAA's line of fire"—um, so the EFF is fine with it if the RIAA only goes after rich people without kids? Somehow I doubt that.

I suppose this just demonstrates that the EFF (which I mostly support, and which I'm a paying member of) has learned how to compete on the political playing field. But it still annoys me.

And that's not even mentioning the rhetoric in the note that comes before the petition, where they say "copyright law shouldn't make criminals out of 60 million Americans." If the main criterion in deciding whether a law is just is how many Americans it turns into criminals, then the EFF should be going after speed limits in a big way. Not to mention laws against jaywalking, shoplifting, noise, running stop signs, taking drugs, and sodomy. I'm not saying laws against any of those things are necessarily good (I'm strongly opposed to some of those laws); I'm just saying that there are an awful lot of laws that "make criminals out of [normal] Americans," so it's a little disingenuous of the EFF to make it sound like copyright laws are somehow unique in this regard, and to suggest that that's the point or intent of copyright laws. The people who passed the law didn't do so in order to be able to label people as criminals; they did so because they believed the law served a public good. People choose to violate that law; nobody is "making" them do so. (They may well not be aware that they're in violation, or they may well think it's a bad law. Let me make perfectly clear that I'm not not not arguing about that here. I'm just saying that the EFF is making it sound like 60 million innocent victims (most of them homeless 12-year-old undernourished orphan honors students with big round sad eyes) are going to go to jail because of the evil RIAA, and I object to misuse of rhetoric even when it's for a cause I support.)

One Response to “EFF vs RIAA”

  1. Vardibidian

    But the law makes criminals out of law-abiding citizens whose only crime is to fail to abide by the law!

    I loathed that argument the first time I listened to it (in opposition to handgun registration, which made criminals out of law-abiding gun owners who refused to register their guns), and I loathe it now that I hear it with some frequency.

    There is another rhetorical dishonesty in this business, as it happens: what the petition is petitioning Congress to do is to include EFF in “any upcoming hearings regarding the proper scope of copyright enforcement in the digital age.” If you don’t read the thing carefully through to the end, you might well think that the foundation wanted Congress to somehow throw out the RIAA lawsuits (which they couldn’t).

    By the way, I’m against the entire concept of intellectual property, but in favor of either following laws or changing them. I also think that the RIAA are Bad Guys. I think the RIAA is morally and strategically in the wrong prosecuting people who are legally in the wrong; I’ve got no horse in this race, one way or another.

    Redintegro Iraq,
    -Vardibidian.

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