Trade secrets is debateable, but generally I agree they should be privileged as they have no value when not secret. Whereas a song is not devalued by a greater number of listners (unless you're a pretentious indie band).
Well, just because I stated the views of the two sides, does not mean I agree with either.
I mean, I like to point out
everyone's errors after all.
My point was that there is a scale to things - but that both sides are trying to position this as a black-and-white issue (though I think the RIAA et al bear more responsibility on this front). In reality, the correct stance is that while recreational-artistic stuff like music and movies can be considered non-privileged information
in principle, they should probably be considered very
lightly privileged for the practical sake of creator remuneration.
To clarify, I feel that non-privileged information should be completely free, and made available institutionally, i.e. the same way libraries work. In the real world this would almost certainly never work if applied to ALL artistic products. More importantly, we hardly need to reinvent the wheel. The existing model isn't completely broken, it just needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the digital world, where stuff like DRM-free iTunes is perhaps not perfect but decently reasonable.
Regarding the fines: Just because the RIAA didn't make up those numbers themselves, does not mean they are applying them in the spirit that they were intended. Such fines were designed around a smaller number of copyrights, with a much higher individual value in mind, where such fines are proportional (or perhaps even insufficient) to the damage. Or, more succinctly: Corporate patents are typically sold for more than a song
(pun intentional). Of course the copyright and patent system as a whole has been subject to serious abuse and 'gaming of the system' for over two decades now.
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A little history here... not really related to my response above.
Up until the advent of recordable media, there were two models of payment. An artist who put on a show of some kind (musician, actor) was paid for their performance, which was inextricably tied to direct compensation - if you were listening to a song, the artist was right there singing it to you. The performance could be duplicated, but was not fungible. In the case of the artist who created a tangible work (painter, sculptor), payment and ownership was tied to physical possession. In this case the work could not be duplicated (it could be 'copied', but... semantics), but was far more fungible.
Recordable media rewrote the rules by allowing us to compensate for both cases, meaning art of all types is (in theory) unlimited, as fungible art can now be duplicated and duplicatable art is now fungible as well. In theory, this should make the artist redundant and devalue all art so as to make it worthless, but obviously that has not happened. Artists (and those who profit from artists) can still make a living (and then some). In fact recordable media largely drove the idea of artist-as-superstar. In an effect that predicted the later effects of the internet, the increased exposure granted by recordable media more than offset any idea that the artist was redundant.
The key parallel between regular consumer goods and artistic materials is that
increased availability brings with it lower prices. Barring strange situations, that's basic economics. In the best cases, a producer is compensated for the lower prices by having a greatly expanded market, in the worst cases a producer continues to try and have their cake and eat it too and their business suffers for their stubbornness.
I think the RIAA & co have already suffered a massive self-inflicted hit when they refused to recognise Napster for what it was. Ever since then, a culture of entitlement and rebellion has developed that makes people more than happy to gleefully download as much material for free as they possibly can, so as to 'stick it to The Man' (and hey, full disclosure: I'm one of them). In the end this is terribly unhealthy for the market. I think that the correct price point for legal downloads is probably extremely low - fifty cents or even a quarter per song - so as to encourage massive downloading. Even at $1 per song, an album is still around $10. Well, free beats the hell out of that and the genie is out of the bottle so that's what you're competing with.
Mentally, you want to reach the point where people are doing what they do with free file-sharing: investigating artists they would never look at if they had to pay 'real money'. If I can download a whole DRM-free album for $5 or $2, listen to it once, pronounce it horrible, and delete it without giving it a second thought, then I think the industry will finally be able to compete - and win - against free.
I mean if you go all the way back, they very notion of playing a song without the artist is weird and unnatural, but we survived that transition and society worked out a generally beneficial scheme in the end. Leaving principles and theories of what 'should be' aside, I think that the 'spare change song' would be a solid plan with a fairly good chance of success and decent benefits for both sides.
But of course it would require everyone to be adult and honest about the whole situation.