Charles Martin wrote today pointing to a News.Com story (and discussion thread) on the RIAA trying to use the current lame duck session of Congress to get even more anti-consumer legislation into law.
The RIAA is a classic "special interest." It’s narrow, but more important it has money, presence, and the ability to take revenge on those who disobey.
As the price of doing all this has risen, more general interests have been drowned out.
But in an era of Internet Politics, maybe not so much.
Start with the discussion thread itself. A lot of push-back, wouldn’t you say?
This is true generally. The public is on to groups like the RIAA, groups that seek to create artificial scarcity and profit from it. Consumers of digital goods are beginning to recognize their market power and exercise it, either by defying the law or arguing.
The purpose of groups like the Digital Freedom Campaign is to convert this sporadic, economic pressure into something lasting. It’s the same with Save the Internet. Existing "public interest" groups combine with business interests on the other side, then focus their energy on specific issues where they know majority opinion is with them. The beauty is that by keeping their primary effort on the Internet the costs of doing all this is minimized.
But isn’t this just Left Wing Astroturf? That’s the argument conservative leaders are making to their followers in order to fight such groups. That’s what Sadie Fields was saying when she split her Georgia group from the Christian Coalition, which supported net neutrality.
Trying to make every threat to a special interest into a leftist plot, however, has limited utility. So long as these special groups limit their activities to specific issues where they have a consensus behind them, they have a chance to win effective compromises.
And that, in the end, is what we have to seek, effective compromises. In the case of digital rights, an effective compromise means fair use, an end to the technology veto, but new business models that do indeed compensate artists for their work, so long as the incentive belongs to the artist and not just to an immortal corporation.
All we have to do for that to happen is hold on, and allow the economics of abundance to overwhelm those seeking artificial scarcity where it counts, in the market.
