[Update 1/9]

Just a thought: If record companies are so obsessed with being in the selling-plastic-things business and DRM, why not defer to the USB album? The user doesn’t have to worry about ripping it and making sure all the tracks get named right, there’s ample room for varying album sizes, it’s re-useable, and you can have the music files in a DRM format like Apple’s fairplay AAC that attaches to a particular computer or user account. Maybe this kind of solution is too obvious for Sony. Some music groups have tried it, the White Stripes and the Fratellis among them, though I can’t figure out with what success.

Besides the absurdity of the “raid” and the fact that the police did not arrest the makers or distributors, but rather the close-to-minimum-wage employees, you really have to ask about the monetary outcome. I know Kim’s Video and I can promise you that 95% of their clientele don’t listen to the radio, don’t like mainstream music and very likely wouldn’t have purchased an album from that aforementioned Sony musician. They were looking for something eclectic, something different from Pop or R&B, something of a collage or maybe a riff.

Nobody wins in these kinds of legal battles. This is not copyright infringement as Rip, Burn, Sell. This is copyright infringement as Rip, Re-mix, Add and Sell. These “crimes” are different. One takes music as a commodity and just sells it at a cheaper price. The latter approaches music as art and tries to weave something new. We have to find a way to get typical corporate-types to stop viewing their intellectual property as some dead-on-a-disc commodity. New art flows from old art and I’m really starting to think that this same Sony jerk who told on Kim’s would’ve done the same to a good jazz musician in the 40′s who quoted a riff from a Sony artist.