RIAA COME TO TOWN

As the continued, expensive campaign of bringing legal action against alleged filesharers has failed to make any sort of dent at all in illegal filesharing, the RIAA has had to come up with another idea.

Local lawsuits seems to be the answer.

Rather than pick a handfull of people spread across the nation, the new strategy seems to be picking a town at random, turning up, and having a pop at two or three people there. It's kind of like the old Radio One roadshow, only with solicitors.

The idea is that, since pouring hundreds of thousands into nationwide legal action was no longer attracting media attention, by doing this neighbourhood-level attack will ensure local press attention.

So, welcome Evansville, Indiana, home of Jason Burgess and Lee Lutz.

We're not sure this approach is going to prove any more effective for the big labels than their more random approach - partly because a lot of small towns won't take kindly to multinational billion dollar corporations turning up and picking on their sons and daughters, and partly because if you don't live in Evansville, you're not going to hear of the cases; if you do live there, you'll figure that for this sort of campaign to work, the RIAA will have to move on to the distribution area of another paper straight away, and so Evansville will be safe from further attention.

The other possibility is that having given up on trying to make America safe for record companies, the RIAA has decided that it'll just make one town clean, and will, actually, sue everybody in Evansville.

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