The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the cartel (not necessarily pejorative; the RIAA fits the definition of a cartel) of U.S. recording companies, is deeply concerned about artists. Many times, they have used, as an argument against file sharing, the moral argument: when you download music, you're stealing from the artists. And the artists deserve to be paid, too!

In an effort to keep their logic consistent, the RIAA petitioned the federal Copyright Royalty Judges to lower the royalty rates "in applications like cell phone ring tones and other digital recordings." A royalty is a fee paid to a content creator every time his work is publicly performed or copied. Recording companies license content -- in this case, a song -- from an artist and paid him for each copy of the song they sell. In the United States, this is called a "statutory fee" because the fee is set by statute.

How interesting that the RIAA, on the one hand, laments the plight of the poor artist who is losing money because Timmy is downloading illegal copies of his music, and on the other hand, wants to pay those same artists less money. Cell phone ringtones are a gold mine and the RIAA is furious that they have to actually compensate the people who wrote the song! That money should belong to EMI, or Atlantic, or Time Warner!

I haven't read the actual text of this request, so I don't know if the RIAA wants to lower royalty fees for all digital content. If that were the case, certainly any sane judge would realize that they're just trying to weasel their way out of paying for music in a burgeoning new market. That's been the RIAA's tactic all along: instead of adapting themselves to new markets, they've been trying to adapt the new markets to behave like the old ones, so that RIAA won't have to innovate or spend money changing anything. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was a valiant attempt to make digital content behave like analog content, but there's no guarantee that consumers will tolerate it.

I wonder what Metallica thinks now?