In a strangely horrifyingly horrendous (but non-suprising) move, the RIAA are now going after university and college students in the US, after issuing over 600 letters of settlement to persons across the states.
Sweetly, the RIAA have set up a website where the students who receive the letter can enter in a code and settle the case online, as if justice through the courts wasn’t even and option to them.
What made me so angry upon reading this website was that the RIAA had been quoted saying the following to the defendants:
… to help fund the fine of the copyright infringement of music, you can drop out of college of university …
Are they serious? Destroying young lives as well as old?
To quote their website…
The unauthorized reproduction and distribution of copyrighted music is JUST AS ILLEGAL AS SHOPLIFTING A CD. Burning CD’s from peer-to-peer networks like KaZaA, Morpheus or Gnutella is against the law
So, if I walked right now into a music store in America and a CD, I wonder how much the RIAA would sue me; Almost worth trying…
Say if I stole an ice-cream from you. You would no longer have that tasty ice-cream. Whereas if I chose to ‘steal’ an album over the internet the company who sell it still have it, the artist still owns the all the songs and Johnny Public can still sleep safe at night! Stealing involves physical objects. Music sharing is not stealing.
Shoplifting is a completely different crime, involving physical objects and material and not groups of ones and zeros. Filesharing is caring, not stealing.