Times A Changin' for the RIAA

Last week I read that the Recording Industry Ass. of America will stop their lawsuit campaign against supposed music theives, little old ladies who don't even have computers, and sick children.

In case you don't know how this was working, the idea was to stop online music sharing through fear and intimidation by creating a cottage industry for especially evil lawfirms. They would subpoena your ISP for a list people using IP addresses that they identified through nefarious quasi-legal means as illegally sharing music, usually on one of the P2P things that only the ignorant still use, like KaZaa. The Internet being what it is though, often they would identify the wrong people, but our legal system being what it is, when you get a demand letter from some lawyers saying settle for $5,000 or we'll sue you for $500,000, you pretty much have to pay because defending yourself would be a lot more expensive than the $5,000 no matter how innocent or right you are.

I thought it would never end. It didn't really discourage enough people from stealing music online to make a difference, but it was a making a lot of money for those lawyers. I thought with congress, being beholden to the big media companies for campaign contributions, and judges not understanding the technical aspects of how this works, that nothing could stop them. Then they sued the sick transplant girl and that got on a local new show in Pittsburgh. I think that did more to stop them than the legal system ever could.

Now they're going after ISPs. They want your Internet Service Provider to monitor you and turn off your Internet connection if you're doing something they don't like. Some ISPs already aren't taking kindly to that. Apparently they aren't excited about doing the RIAA's dirty work for free.

In other Music Industry news, Gartner, 500page report to tell you what you knew already company, has pronounced the death of the Music CD.