This excellent AP article fills us in on the latest in the RIAA crusade of justice. A quote from the article says: "The legal assault on music file-swappers is an unparalleled move by recording companies desperately trying to survive after failing to fully embrace digital distribution methods and driving up the cost of CDs." The author doesn't pull any punches and predicts a backlash from the public.
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The Recording Industry Association of America said it settled the first of the suits for $ 2,000. The defendant was Sylvia Torres, the mother of 12-year-old Brianna Lahara of New York, who was accused of downloading more than 1,000 songs from Kazaa. The effort by some to make it all go away may bode well for the industry, but some observers and lawmakers began to question the tactic. Accounts emerged that some of those caught in the industry's piracy net were young children and seniors hardly the perfect poster image of a hard-core music pirateer. That led some to question whether the industry might be making its problem even worse. During a Senate Judiciary Hearing Tuesday, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., alluded to whether the industry wasn't going too far while questioning Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America. "Are you headed to junior high schools to round up the usual suspects?" Durbin asked Sherman. Sherman told Durbin the industry is merely trying to get the message across that sharing music is illegal and that people may be caught. |
The article goes on to quote Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research, Inc. "Just because a person stops file-sharing does not mean they will start buying CDs and generating revenue for the industry." Many of these individuals have gotten out of the habit of buying CDs," Bernoff said. "They think CDs are too expensive, they only want a couple of tracks on the CD."
Source: abcnews.go.com
