Fightin' the Man (Smallish Post 8)

Did recording companies bring condemnation down on their own heads? When CD-Rs started to become more readily available, the average consumer noticed that the cost of a physical CD was not just a little less than the cost of one produced by a recording company; the cost of producing a CD was miniscule. I feel that this underscores a corrupt collective corporate environment in the recording industry. If this is my perception, it may well be others' also. The main motivation for the rabid enforcement and reinforcement of copyright law is the recording industry's fear of losing control of work that they could never produce in the first place. The "service" they provide reminds me of my experience trying to buy a Nintendo Wii -- people who had the time to camp out at stores would buy up all the units they could, then resell them online for significantly higher (often at least doubled) prices. The only "service" that they rendered was making it more difficult to buy a Wii at retail price! Similarly, with the advent of digital media in connection with the Internet, the only service that I feel these companies provide is a higher price than what I would pay if the artist were selling to me directly. Had the companies not inflated their prices in the first place, the conflict of copyright law and digital media may well have never come into being.