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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

We need some billionaire to step in and lobby against organisations like RIAA to make them illegal. First one who does it, will be forever remembered as the one who saved artists and their fans. RIAA only protects labels who obtain rights to art in questionable manner (just read so many stories about artists being cheated by the label). We need something that will be paying artists directly and there is technology to solve that. RIAA is a cancer and must go.

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What a world we have come to when the only hope of bad laws being changed is if "some billionaire" takes a fancy in our cause.

A world where corruption has been labelled as lobbying and everyone seem to accept that. People only vote on who can line their pockets and hope they have some semblance of morals. Unfortunately there is no other way to make change in area protected by massive wealth.

Labels must go too. Artists legitimately needed them when distribution required physically producing and distributing media to stores. With the advent of the internet, this is no longer required, so these middlemen serve no practical purpose any more. They're an unfortunate holdover.

For mainstream labels, sure, but independent labels still serve an important curatorial role.

Small labels are nothing like the big ones, just like small software shop is nothing like Google. We need laws that will require companies to split once they reach certain thresholds otherwise this is just getting nasty. At certain point companies get unfair competitive advantage and they have so much money they literally can buy laws to make sure any competition is kept at bay.

The fact that it comes down to "the RIAA continues to have power" versus "we have to trust some billionaire to stop this" is disgusting, imo.

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