Chicken Little and the Recorded Music Crisis

PUBLISHED BY THE IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY 1540-7993/03/$17.00 © 2003 IEEE IEEE SECURITY & PRIVACY 73 F or the past few years, the recorded music industry has blamed the “falloff” in CD sales on piracy, and they have lobbied heavily against technologies like file-sharing and CD writers. Now, I am against piracy and in favor of artists being paid for their work, but before we start adding special-purpose restrictive hardware to everyone’s computer, let’s recognize that this is an old story. Music sales have declined in the past, and the recording industry has repeatedly blamed new technologies. But the new technologies haven’t gone away; the solution has always been some kind of economic bargain, and we should again expect an economic bargain to deal with the problems caused by online music distribution.