News of the RIAA Overly Zealous Prosecution False
12.31.07 - 02:51pm
The RIAA (Record Recording industry of America) is fast becoming more hated than the IRS by anyone who has ever copied a CD or made the travesty of errors and passed a copy to a friend. With over 20,000 lawsuits against individuals, especially young college students, for passing on a digital copied songs the news that the RIAA was adding personal CD recordings, ripped to a computer, strictly for the use of the individual who bought the CD, as cause for a lawsuit was quickly believed and passed on from the Washington Post to blogs everywhere. The accusation however was false.
The new had come out that the RIAA was threatening to prosecute an Arizona man who had the gall to put his CD collection of over 2000 songs onto his computer for his own personal MP3 use. While the RIAA does say it is illegal for an individual to legally transfer a CD to the computer even if they don’t share it with anyone else, according to Engadget, they are not prosecuting the Arizona resident for that but rather for illegally downloading the songs from sites on the net to his computer.
Nevertheless, the news that the RIAA is fighting a more applicable battle doesn’t change that they may be fighting one of their last battles, as the major music labels are set to pull their funding. The funding the labels has given the RIAA is what has payed for their legal battles, with no impact except to see their millions of dollars going out the window and an ever growing hatred of the RIAA and the record labels for their petty prosecutions. EMI has already stated that they will be “substantially cutting their funding to industry’s trade bodies,” and Warner may be soon to follow after announcing they made half the money that Radiohead in did this last year, largely due to the vast amount of proceeds that went to suing their customers.
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