The RIAA, that is.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=582&e=3&cid=582&u=/nm/20030118/wr_nm/tech_internet_music_dc

Lifted from Slashdot. I cannot believe the depths they're sinking to in order to perpetuate this riduclous agenda.

I note this bit from that story:

In reply to:

---

Officials from Pressplay and MusicNet, which are in their second year in operation, declined to disclose how many customers they have.

"We haven't really started yet," said Alan McGlade, CEO of MusicNet, when asked about his subscriber base.

Michael Bebel, CEO of Pressplay, said his customers tally is in the tens of thousands. He added that the firm, backed by Universal and Sony, could expand into Canada in the first half of the year, its second market after the U.S. He didn't have a timeframe for Europe.

Meanwhile, Kazaa and Morpheus claim tens of millions of registered users who download a wide variety of tracks for free.

---

Yeah and while the Record companies fiddles about with online music, Kazaa and Morphues users can do the downloading right now, not in 6, 12 or 60 months time when the "official" sites get going.

I also wonder about these guys [the RIAA] saying that the demand for broadband is mostly due to file swapping and the ISPs know this and are therefore responsible - thats a very long bow to pull.

Thats a different kettle of fish from suing Kazaa which is a file swapping service ala Napster, to suing an ISP "just because they have a customer who uses bandwidth in a way they choose to".

They are tacking a leaf out of the book that the MPAA uses for dealing with movie-swapping sites - in this case the MPAA sends a cease and desist letter to ISPs outside the US when they find (users) websites hosted at that ISP, that are hosting music or video files.

And while technically this has no legal validity, the ISPs tend to comply and take the sites down, even though they know they have no legal right or authority to do so.

If I start to see higher ISP charges due to something like this, I will start downloading music instead of buying CDs. To me, the justification will be that I'm paying for it anyway.

Drakino wrote:
>I will start downloading music instead of buying CDs.
>To me, the justification will be that I'm paying for it anyway.

You have a VERY good point there. If the cost of downloading music is already factored into your monthly ISP charge then you are already technically paying for music that you haven't downloaded yet.

I recall the same thing happening with blank audio tapes many years ago.

As a sidenote - I was never a big user of napster and the like, usually only downloading stuff that I couldn't find at the stores and my yearly CD purchase was perhaps 1-5 per year TOPS. Since the purchase of my empeg, I find that a lot of the music I do find online is inferior in quality to what I could product myself. So, I now buy on average 2 CDs per month.

-COB

And try this RIAA-Kazaa tidbit:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=77&e=1&cid=77&u=/mc/20030122/tc_mc/judge__verizon_must_turn_over_name_of_music_downloader

I just barely saw this! This so sucks for internet privacy!