hyc's Journal: Ignore the MPAA/RIAA

The MPAA/RIAA are out to control everything you watch and listen to, and make you pay every time you do so. But the reality is, they are not the sole source of creative works in the world.

More artists need to realize that they don't need to sign with an RIAA label to get their works promoted and out into the public eye. Any musician can self-publish today and reach a focused audience of fans. The advantages to the musician are stupendous - instead of getting 10 cents per recording as they would from a label contract, they get 100% of their sales straight into their own pockets.

Every year Hollywood turns out reel after reel of the same old insipid dreck. As a filmmaker, you may not have the big budgets that can churn out a special effects blockbuster, but if you really care about your craft, then you know that getting the story across is all that counts. It used to be that all you needed to tell a story was, well, a story. And a voice, and a will to tell it. Artists/creators need to realize that this *is* all you need - you don't need the big studios "help." And you certainly don't need their "help" selling your creativity or "managing" your "digital rights."

A lot of the uproar over the DMCA and DRM mess has been about how consumers are getting shafted. This is all true and we need to fight that. But a lot of people seem to be be facing this from the perspective that the MPAA/RIAA really do own all the creative works in the world, and that just isn't true. And the more we encourage people to stop participating in their shell game, the more we encourage people to independently express their creativity, the less relevant those Associations become. Then it doesn't matter what laws they pass, because *we* own the content. And that's really the bottom line - *individuals* should have always owned the content, from the very beginning. Assigning ownership to these corporations should never have happened in the first place. Taking back control of our rights as consumers isn't going to be possible until we first take back our rights as creators.