Apple's announcement that it would begin selling ringtones through the iTunes Store has kicked off quite a debate over ringtones. New York Times columnist David Pogue recently asked his readers to explain to them why the heck anyone would want to pay for ringtones and got back some interesting answers — no one wants to.
So why are we paying for ringtones? Well, if you read the Wired How To Wiki on the subject, hopefully you're not, but if you are, here's a thought from copyright attorney Nilay Patel: You're a sucker.
Well, actually Patel doesn't say that, he merely points out that there's no legal basis whatsoever for charging for ringtones.
In fact, the dreaded RIAA made sure that was the case by successfully arguing, as Patel says, “since making a ringtone doesn't count as a derivative work, you're not infringing any copyrights. Just don't sell or distribute anything, and you should be fine.”
The reason the RIAA wanted that decision was because it wanted to collect royalties from those who sell ringtones, without giving any money back to the artists who created the songs. In order to set that up, the RIAA had to first prove ringtones were not derivative works, and a judge agreed with them.
The only thing I can conclude from this is that turning around and paying for ringtones makes us all suckers.
John Gruber has a great piece on Daring Fireball where he nicely sums up how we came to have a multi-billion dollar industry surrounding ringtones. In a word: marketing.
So stop being a sucker. Head over to the Wired How To Wiki and get to it. One caveat: Apple's Terms of Service for the iTunes store prevent you from re-using protected songs as ringtones, but so long as you only use songs you've ripped from a CD you're probably fine.
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