But didn’t the RIAA stop suing people months ago?  Yep.  They finally figured out that it’s a bad idea to sue your customers.  Doesn’t due a lot for customer loyalty.  I’m sure there was some expensive “study” that figured it out for them.  However this particular case was already in motion.  Why didn’t they just drop it?  All they’ve said is they now it’s a bad idea but they’re going to keep going with it anyway in this case.  Dumb.

Now all they’ve done is ruin this poor woman’s life.  It’s not going to have any effect on illegal downloading, except probably to increase it.  And there’s no way in hell they’re ever going to get their money.  In her lifetime this woman would not make that amount of money.  And now she certainly has no drive to.  All they’ve done is create a welfare case.  Good job RIAA.

The RIAA’s next mistake is going after the new streaming sites.  I think the biggest issue among consumers about mp3s is portability.  Why did Zune fail?  Because you’re restricted as to where you can take the music.  If you’re streaming from Grooveshark, you’re stuck on their website.

Let’s see, that sounds a lot like radio…. And any record label rep will tell you that they’ll kill to get their songs on the radio.  So now there’s a radio style website that wants to put all their songs out there and they choose to sue them.  Duh.

I do think songwriters should get performance rights money from these sites.  That would force them to figure out how to be profitable.  Like a “real” business.  Oh wait..You think Grooveshark is running their site out of the goodness of their heart to give away free music?  Hardly.  They’ve got bills to pay too.  Hosting companies don’t work for free either.

Check out Tuesday’s post for part 2 of the post and to see what my views on downloading are.

Phil Johnson

http://www.RoadsideAttraction.com

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