Intellectual Property Law

Get Yourself Some RIAA-Free Music

By Posted by Alan Wexelblat

I wish I'd seen this in time to post it for peoples' end-of-year buying, but here you go anyway...

RIAA Radar is a site dedicated to offering enough information to make more-informed choices about your music buying, assuming you care about the Copyright Wars.

For the past 6+ years I've refused to buy new CDs retail. I buy direct from artists, I buy used, and I buy DJ white-label disks. Anything else feels like supporting the enemy. What RIAA Radar offers is a set of technological gadgets that let you make more fine-grained distinctions than I make.

For example, you can go to an album's detail page on Amazon.com, press a button and be told that the album is "Safe" in that it's not released by a member of the RIAA. Or not safe, obviously.

There are some nice features, such as a button directly on the RIAA Radar pop-up that lets you submit a correction if you find their conclusion to be in error. They also have some close links to Amazon, which may not please some people, but there's nothing stopping you using the data to take your shopping to whatever retail venue pleases you.

As with many open-source/volunteer software efforts there are some rough edges to the technology, but in general it seems to be a pretty useful gadget to have on a Copyfighter's bookmark bar.

Full post as published by Copyfight - The Politics of IP on January 04, 2008 (boomark / email).