No Rock And Roll Fun

IT'S LIKE SUING THE SEA BECAUSE IT KEEPS PIRATES AFLOAT: Another unexpected example of the RIAA throwing its weight about like it was some sort of elected body comes in one of their own press releases, having sued a couple of people who run a flea market. It's another blow for the artists' rights, right? Erm, not really, because the two guys Ho Suh Jin and Gustavo Zarate hadn't sold so much as a single faux single. Instead, they were sued because - it's claimed - they'd not been proactive enough in stopping people who took stalls at their markets from selling pirated music. Now, you might wonder what they're meant to have done - demand certificates of authenticity from every vendor for everything they sell? - and, if this market was such a hotbed of illegal record sales, wouldn't it have made more sense to sue the guys flogging the records rather than the blokes who did little more than put up the handbills? Ah, but then, of course, there would need to have been solid proof of illegal activity; any court would ask to see the records and the proof that they were, indeed, bootleg - there would have been a need for a criminal burden of proof. Much easier to sue the flea market managers, a private, balance-of-probabilities type affair.

There's a secondary aspect to this story, and the other pretend-police raids on men selling boxes of records from car boots (and the complaints about Amazon's 'buy used' buttons) - because any flea market owner is going to think twice before letting Record Box Men take a table now, regardless of what their stock consists of. The RIAA is slowly using a cloak of anti-piracy to try and shut out the entire second hand record business. We'd be very surprised if we don't hear of the targeting of shops before the season is out.