RIAA and EFF are in the same place

As strange as it may appear, the RIAA (lobbying arm of the music industry) and the EFF (lobbying group for civilian privacy among other things), are fighting a war for the same thing: control of their bits, their information. This control used to be self evident. The rule was simple: I own the information, I control it. This let the RIAA put their bits on little plastic disks, and charge huge sums of money. This same control, allowed private citizens (who the EFF is defending) to have some confidence that they couldn’t be aggregated, observed and analyzed in huge databases at the twiddle of a mouse.

The two organizations are fighting for the same thing, and that fight is subject to the same inescapable forces. And as certain as gravity, the war they think they are fighting, has already been lost. No amount of legislation, protest, battle, will put the respective genies back in the bottle.

In each case, there was a moment that signified a turning point. For the RIAA it started right at the beginning, with Napster, which allowed music sharing on an industrial scale. Once Napster had hit the scene, all was over. Despite the RIAA successfully blowing the service out of the water, the celebrations were only momentary. Many new services slipped right into Napster’s niche, and today, the children of Napster rule the Earth.

As for the EFF, there is non other than Osama Bin Laden, who, by murdering 3,000 people, succeeded in enslaving the other 6 billion in a surveillance society. Terrorism has been used as an excuse for almost every loss of privacy, every subsequent invasion of what used to be our own space.

But these incidents are effect not cause. Cause is the Internet. And though the EFF would like to put our personal information back in a jar, and the RIAA would like to stick their music back in the music shops, it would be like stopping the rising of the sun, or undoing the nuclear age. The Internet made information free, and not all of the information it made free is information we would like to set free.

And now for the evidence:

The US department of homeland security now searches laptops and MP3 players when people enter the country. Invasive? You bet. Worse than having someone go through your dirty underwear is someone going through your emails, isn’t it? (laptop searches) Here’s another example, where the FBI tapped the email of an entire ISP. Accidental? Yes. A surprise? No. (email surveillance)

And I don’t need to tell you about the numerous attempts to stop the trading of music online, such as in the UK: (ISP control). But to see how it’s all going, just head over to Pirate Bay.

It’s all over folks. It’s 1984 in 2008, and guess what? We get free music with a slight threat of a lawsuit in exchange for having our every move scrutinized by any government or worse, anyone with a powerful server. And maybe we can get the worst of both worlds: punitive lawsuits based on government surveillance!