Um … if I’ve bought a CD (versus, say, finding illegally pirated versions of the music online and downloading them), I’ve done just what the RIAA wants, right?
And if I’m a CD pirate, I’m already aware of laws against pirating CDs, right?
So why does the RIAA not only insist on anti-pirating warning labels on CD case liners, but now on CDs themselves?
This all seems like the dumbest fucking idea in the world. I just want to shake every single moron who works for the RIAA by the lapels and say to them, “Do you understand? The thing that makes me want to buy CDs is that I am a geek who enjoys having physical objects around. If you go around stamping ugly text directly on the artwork in a CD’s packaging, you are decreasing my incentive to want to buy it, because you are making it objectively less attractive as an object.”
I am (seriously) waiting for anti-piracy messages to show up as audio tracks on the CDs themselves — and then to be included as part of each song’s track, too.
If the recording industry put as much effort into producing stuff that the (majority honest) buyers wanted to buy as they put into harrassing the (majority honest) buyers they depend upon, we’d have a new musical renaissance upon us.