As if you needed any more reason to distrust and dislike the RIAA, BusinessWeek has an article this week detailing one woman’s fight against the cartel and its tactics. Tanya Andersen, a 45-year-old single mother, was sued by the RIAA several years for illegally downloading a couple of songs. Only, you know, she didn’t download a damn thing (she claims). She hired a Seattle lawyer to help her out who then went on to expose the RIAA’s tactics: the screen name linked to her IP address—and we all know how easy it is to spoof an IP address, steal someone else’s Wi-Fi, and so on—was in use by some kid with a MySpace page wherein he described downloading the songs in questions. (Something tells me Andersen doesn’t listen to rap.) The RIAA was all like, “Well, the kid said he didn’t download the music and we believe him.” Inconsistent? Believe the kid but not Andersen?
Long story short (seriously, read the whole article, it should take like five minutes), Andersen is now suing the record labels for their scare tactics under conspiracy laws.
A fun, quick, Saturday afternoon read. Also, hating the RIAA is sport ’round these parts.
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Probably ran a credit check on both parties, and “trusted” the word of the one without attachable assets while finding “untrustable” the mom who did have assets to go after. Because even the RIAA can’t get blood out of a stone.
The RIAA is a racket.
That is why the “intellectual property rights” that were collected upon cassette sales never made it to the performers, lyric writers, or music composers.
We should ask one of these questions to presidential candidates in next debates if any:
“Are you going to shut down RIAA or at least have it stop its unfair practices once you become the president?”
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