No Rock And Roll Fun

AN EXAMPLE OF HOW GREEDY THE RIAA ARE: Downloading is, of course, wrong and illegal and set well beyond "tutting" - we imagine that if God was sending down the commandments, he'd include some words about not ripping an MP3 from a CD. We're equally curious, however, to know what God would think about the blatant greed being exhibited by the RIAA in its lawsuits. The latest example of grasping claws comes from Florida, where Erika Emanski's kids downloaded 634 rap songs - five hundred bucks worth on iTunes. The RIAA claims that it's due USD475,000. Seven hundred and fifty bucks per song. Of course, once again they're going after poor people who can ill-afford to stand up to them, and so will end up "settling" for a few thousand. We know the RIAA believes it has to make some sort of point, but is this the point it really wants to make? That the people who run the music industry are such greedy assholes they'll claim songs are worth nearly 1,000 times their actual value to shake some cash out of people already making ends meet?

Maybe the people caught in the RIAA cash-grab should take a lesson from the way the RIAA members paid their dues when convicted of price-fixing. Ordered to give free CDs to worthy causes, they sent any old shit they had lying around. In that spirit, people sued by the RIAA should pay in a mixture of old postage stamps, coins dropped from circulation, post-dated cheques and money from the plastic bowl where the foriegn currency goes at the end of holidays.