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RIAA reminds me of 1950s-era urban planners

RIAA reminds me of 1950s-era urban planners

Tom Merritt Former CNET executive editor
Jane Jacobs was speaking of city planning when she wrote the following, but if you substitute the recording industry for city planners, you seem to have a good description of the current situation with DRM (digital rights management) and the RIAA. I definitely think the comparison to bloodletting is appropriate.

"As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense. The tools of technique have steadily been perfected. Naturally, in time, foreceful and able men, admired administrators, having swallowed the initial fallacies and having been provisioned with tools and with public confidence, go on logically to the greatest destructive excesses, which prudence or mercy might previously have forbade. Bloodletting could could heal only by accident or insofar as it broke the rules, until the time when it was abandoned in favor of the hard, complex business of assembling, using and testing, bit by bit, true descriptions of reality drawn not from how it ought to be, but from how it is. The pseudoscience of city planning and its companion, the art of city design, have not yet broken with the specious comfort of wishes, familiar superstitions, oversimplifications, and symbols, and have not yet embarked upon the adventure of probing the real world."

-Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities