Happy New Year! The RIAA still hates us all!

[The People's DJ]

Despite more than 20,000 lawsuits filed against music fans in the years since they started finding free tunes online rather than buying CDs from record companies, the recording industry has utterly failed to halt the decline of the record album or the rise of digital music sharing.

Still, hardly a month goes by without a news release from the industry's lobby, the Recording Industry Association of America, touting a new wave of letters to college students and others demanding a settlement payment and threatening a legal battle.

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 00693.html

[Bar Rat]

Do these people not realize they're cutting their own throat when people actually do buy CD's and put the contents on their mp3 player? I know people who do this. It's a lot lighter to carry what amounts to a flash drive with an audio output than a CD player!

I don't personally own an mp3 player, but I do have 4,000+ songs on my computer (and no, I don't share the directory, and it's on a media storage unit that can mysteriously disappear on a whim!)