the folly of intellectual property

This is a little late in coming, I've been away. Last week Yuhui brought to my attention that IPOS had issued a statement that ownership of a CD does not come with the rights to rip the CD (i.e. convert to digital computer format). This means that almost everyone carrying around commercial music on their digital devices if violating the law. Although I couldn't find the actual release, I have since confirmed this with my friend at IPOS.

I think this is an extremely disturbing and myopic regulation. First of all, it should have been drawn to the attention of the public when portable media players were first popularised, to pre-empt the purchase of these gadgets under misguided notions of legality. There must now be tens of thousands of people using portable media players and unless the police conducts a massive crackdown, it is unlikely that these people are going to waste their investment by abandoning digital music, just because IPOS has recently issued this clarification. Not without a draconian crackdown at least.

The solution of course is to download the music from online sites, since these are distributed with their own license. The drawback to this is that all foreign sites I have tried reject my credit card because it is a Singapore address (even though it is a US credit card). Our own Soundbuzz is still quite lacking in terms of variety and currency. It also distributed only in WMA format, which will be a problem for iPodders and it does not include the artist's name in the filename! Until better sites become available, this will not be a viable alternative to buying CDs.

The most likely outcome is that people will start asking themselves why they are buying the CDs at all, if it gives them no legal rights to the music. If they are going to listen to mp3s anyway and owning the CD does not legitimise this, then what for buy the CD? After all, there are plenty of file-sharing technologies supplying a huge variety of music freely available on the internet.