Hilary Rosen, the former Chairman and CEO of the RIAA (Recording Industry Ass. of America) will be guest blogging on Lawrence Lessig’s blog this week. I think it will be interesting to see what she has to say now, two years after stepping down from her post at the RIAA. I’m curious how much of the propaganda she was spewing for her 17 year’s at the RIAA she actually believes, or if it was just what she was required to say as the CEO. In her time there, she plowed over what the copyright in the constitution stands for, fixing CD prices, as well trying to shut down Internet radio and poisoning peer-to-peer file sharing networks. It’s also interesting to me that she’s blogging for Lessig who is the driving force behind the Creative Commons and free culture, which on the surface really doesn’t quite mesh with the record companies views on copyrights. Well, it does and it doesn’t. CC gives the control back to copyright holders rather than a work automatically becoming copyrighted and that’s that. CC allows an artist to choose how much copyright protection a work has. Apparently Hilary doesn’t hate CC and actually sees the need for a different type of licensing (see her article from Wired Magazine 12.11). I digress… back to Hilary’s posts. She mentions in her first post that she’s working on a book, which I’m assuming will be about her time at the RIAA. Again, I would be very interested to read about the mindset at the RIAA and get a bit of an inside look at an industry that was (and maybe still is) running scared about this whole internet thing. Maybe this week in her posting, she’ll give a little insight into that area.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to read an under-cover expose on the machine which is RIAA? I am not assuming that Rosen didn’t buy into all the garble that she put forth, but it would make for an interesting turn in the battle for reasonable copyrighting. She could pull a “reverse Hulk Hogan” and go from Bad to Good!