"While politicians want to slip invasive legislation into the Internet, the recording industry just wants to make sure they continue to make all the money."

Sit down kids and gather round old Titmowse as I recount yet another of my numerous restaurant tales. I have a lot of them because I worked in them for a long time and I would "relocate" quite often. This restaurant anecdote is my ASCAP story.

I was working at this high tech pizza joint in Dallas around the summer of 1983. We were painfully trendy right down to the cool, non-pizzeria music we piped through on the sound system. The place was a hit and many were the days that I had to open the front door early because a small crowd had gathered around it. Customers loved our food, the open kitchen, the stylish design and the hot tunes we played. Then one morning, a strange man showed up at our door before opening.

It was a full half-hour before we were supposed to open. He was either a fool that couldn't read the hours of operation sign, or he knew exactly the time of day we would be without customers. He wanted to see the owner or the manager and neither one of them had rolled out of bed and come to work yet. He wouldn't identify himself and insisted on knowing when one of them would positively be in store. I told him I had no idea and he left. He did this for a few more days and finally caught one of my slippery superiors sipping coffee at a back table. He and she talked for a while and he left. It turns out the guy was from ASCAP.

ASCAP is the American Society for Composers and Authors. ASCAP "protects the rights of its members by licensing and distributing royalties for the non-dramatic public performances of their copyrighted works". In other words, ASCAP collects royalty fees.

This mysterious fella wanted our little pizza place to pay royalties on the music we played for the public. We played tapes for the clientele and ASCAP had a problem with our collection of compilation tapes. We could play any pre-recorded tape because the artists who recorded them had been compensated, but if we made our own tapes, we had to pony up. I was amazed that in a city of almost two million people and thousands of restaurants, this man tracked us down.

I think of that ASCAP guy every time I here about peer-to-peer file sharing. In the pre-Napster days of the early eighties, it seemed to me the music industry had no problem finding those who owed them money. Then again ASCAP is an organization created by and for artists whereas the RIAA is run by and for recording companies.

RIAA stands for the Recording Industry Association of America who are "the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry. Its mission is to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members' creative and financial vitality".

ASCAP has been very quiet about P2P technology and the RIAA has been very loud. The important point to remember is that ASCAP has no lobby in Washington and the RIAA does. The RIAA has spent millions of -supposedly dwindling- dollars fighting P2P technology and have been so successful in their scare campaign; they've managed to get the politicians in on the game. Here's some text from the Peer to Peer Piracy Act introduced by Congressman Howard Berman (CA) July 25, 2002:

"...(A) copyright owner shall not be liable in any criminal or civil action for disabling, interfering with, blocking, diverting, or otherwise impairing the unauthorized distribution, display, performance, or reproduction of his or her copyrighted work on a publicly accessible peer-to-peer file trading network, if such impairment does not, without authorization, alter, delete, or otherwise impair the integrity of any computer file or data residing on the computer of a file trader".

To phrase the legalese in the above text, those who own the copyrights to a song or movie or other such creations can hack into your computer. They can DOS attack your inbox and snoop around in your files all they want without your authorization or notification and without fear of prosecution for their invasion of your privacy.

The Peer to Peer Piracy Act is a damned scary piece of legislation and has chilling repercussions. While I totally agree that artists deserve to be paid, take into account ASCAP's silence on the P2P matter and the RIAA's boisterous crusade of alarm concerning the digital age's version of taping songs off the radio. The fact is the recording industry does not represent artists, they profit from artists. The RIAA has fought every form of home recording since the reel-to-reel. The average music artist makes a maximum of 8¢ per $15.99 CD sale. While politicians want to slip invasive legislation into the Internet, the recording industry just wants to make sure they continue to make all the money.

Nineteen years ago, the ASCAP guy made sense. We were a service who partly made their money because of the music we provided. Charging us royalty fees for our homemade tapes made sense because we were using artists as a profit tool. What doesn't make sense is if that ASCAP guy could find a little pizzeria in a huge city with 1983 procedures, why does the recording Industry need to invade our personal machines in this age of information?