No Rock And Roll Fun

THERE ARE MORE USERS ON THE LINE: Who knew that closing off one download service would just drive people elsewhere? asks the Guardian, rhetorically of course. It wouldn't be as wrong as to provide links to the next generation of filesharing services, but hey, a list of names and google a click away is pretty tempting, yeah?

Meanwhile, looking at the pending courtcases, the paper quotes a record industry executive as saying: "The message up to now has been, 'No, no, no, no, no - be good kids, don't do it,' and everybody laughs at us, saying, 'What are you going to do, sue me? Are you going to risk the bad press?' I think we're at a moment where maybe we need really bad press" . So they're actively seeking opprobrium.

Is there a way to fight back? Maybe there is. They want to scare music users, so maybe we should all act scared. Perhaps we should all set up template files in our email programs, and whenever we're about to play a track on our computer, we should email the record label, copying it to the RIAA, asking 'Is it okay to play this track?' We'd suggest wording along the lines of:

"Hello. I'm about to use my computer to play [track] by [band]. Bearing in mind how you're now taking people to court for copyright violations, I just thought I'd check that was alright with you?"

A few hundred thousand of those everyday might cool their ardour a little.

Meanerwhile, if you're worried about gettign caught using Kazaa, there's some hints on how not to get caught on metafilter. then there's some other alternatives. Then it starts to talk about Linux, which is where we gently make our excuses and leave.

But, hey kids: (And we mean this seriously) If you like music, go out (or to Amazon) and buy some music. Seriously. CDs are nice things to have, and you can make trousers out of them.