Obama loves the media mafia
President Obama has appointed yet another RIAA lawyer to the Justice Department. This now makes a total of five. If this isn’t pandering to special interests, I don’t know what is.
In case you don’t know who the RIAA are, they are the media cartel that has spent the last few years exploiting the court system in an attempt to keep the ailing and dying music industry alive through lawsuits. Instead of embracing new technologies and changing with consumer demands, they have instead used the legal system to suppress and out right shut down companies and technologies that they deem infringing to their interpretation of copyright laws. In recent years, they are most famous for launching lawsuits against their own consumers (including students and the elderly) who have little means to defend themselves.
The RIAA has done a good job of suppressing the free market through the their legal wrangling. In the past decade, the combination of digital media and the internet has rocked the foundation of our copyright system. P2P applications like Napster let the cat out of the bag and consumer demand took a dramatic shift. The free market was screaming for a change to the copyright laws and was ready to enter a new age of media distribution. This threatened traditional media companies entrenched in old lines of distribution that they completely controlled end to end. With deep pockets, the RIAA geared up their legal army for battle. In the end, innovation was held back and the free market suffered.
So this paints a rather dismal picture of what our Justice Department will be like over the next few years. We now have at least five appointees that have no problem using the legal system to bully citizens into falling in line with corporate (or even government) special interests. This also sends a message that the government endorses this kind of behavior and has no problem furthering the cause of corporations over the interest of the citizens. Above all, this is a clear display that the government is looking to take an active role in controlling the free market.
The line between government and corporations has been blurred more. One fighting to control the other in some kind of strange and evil synergy.
