RIAA Sues Customers... Again... And Again...
Earlier in June the RIAA was suing students and taking their life savings (even though they weren't doing anything illegal, just running a search engine), and now they're getting set to do a lot more suing. They really need to wake up an realise what an opportunity they have with technology - it's free advertising on a massive scale, that the customers will do for you. Perhaps instead of trying to squelch the technology (and idea which was already stopped by the courts) or suing their target market they could try and make buying CDs worth it. Some people have already got this idea, with including cool extras on their CDs, or other bonus things with the purchase (the latest Deftones CD came with a cool keychain, they could make cooler more interesting inserts, etc.).
One of the dumbest things throughout this is that the RIAA is claiming that they're losing billions of dollars in sales because of this. Let's look at the evidence, shall we? When Napster was in full swing, and before it got shut down, the music companys were growing. After Napster was shut down their sales lowered expectantly (most people I know were buying more CDs because of finding new artists on Napster), and came in line with the rest of the economy. These days they are shrinking and blame the file swappers, but if you compare their changing size with that of the economy they are almost exactly the average. Sounds more like they just want to blame someone else for not being good enough to escape the nation-wide economic woes, or maybe they just want to make some extra dough by taking all the college kids' money. Either way, they're still bastards.
