Last Updated on: 7th June 2013, 03:39 pm
The story is a couple months old and I’m not sure this is still going on, but it’s worth noting anyway because when the RIAA comes down on the right side of things, you really are doing it wrong.
If you work in the United States House of Representatives and like to pass your time by listening to music on Spotify, you’d best be finding yourself something else to do. Why? Because parts of Spotify utilize forms of P2P technology, and since P2P is evil, we can’t be having any of that going on around here.
That’s right. Somebody or a group of somebodys who must look at everything in black and white made the decision to block it on the House network. Spotify, in case you were unaware, is both completely legal and endorsed by the RIAA and its labels.
And this is where I want to note the RIAA being sensible, because it doesn’t happen very often. In fact I may never get another chance, so here goes.
These services are safe and secure, and assuring access to them not only respects the contractual relationship users may have with these services, but also achieves an important public policy goal of promoting legal, safe digital providers.
Yes, that really is the RIAA talking about the rights of users and promoting legal digital music services. Sure it’s got a hand in the pie, but still. It wasn’t all that long ago when the RIAA was kicking and screaming and fighting as hard as it could against taking things digital in ways that people actually might want to use, and now here they are defending it. They’ve got a looooooong way to go, but it’s amazing to think about how far they’ve come.
