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The good news is that the RIAA’s relentless drive to sue the people who buy music has reached the point of utter rediculousness. The bad news is that it could wind up being a royal pain for a lot of people before it finally blows up in the RIAA’s collective faces.

The RIAA has now said, if you lend a CD YOU PURCHASED to a friend so they can listen to it, or you copy it to iTunes to put on your iPod, you are a thief.

A recent article in the Washington Post details the case against Jeffrey Howell, of Scottsdale Arizona. Mr. Howell committed the high crime of copying about 2,000 musical recordings, that he purchased legally, to his personal computer.

The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings…

RIAA’s hard-line position seems clear. Its Web site says: “If you make unauthorized copies of copyrighted music recordings, you’re stealing. You’re breaking the law and you could be held legally liable for thousands of dollars in damages.”

They even argue that it’s illegal to lend a CD to a friend, even if that friend doesn’t make a copy of the music.

The buggy whip manufacturers have filed suit against the people who bought cars.

Over 100 million iPods have been sold. Microsoft has sold dozens of Zunes. Other manufacturers have sold millions of MP3 players. In almost all of those cases, users have copied legally purchased CDs to their computers for transfer to their MP3 players.  While to most reasonable people, this seems to be a textbook example of “fair use,” the RIAA disagrees, and have been willing to file suit against people to prove it.

So, I think they should push this issue to it’s logical conclusion. If it really is stealing, why cherry pick among users just because you think they’re too scared to fight back?

I think we can safely guess that the users of MP3 players fall into a relatively narrow demographic band. We can exempt the very young and many senior citizens. And we’ve already seen that the RIAA doesn’t require a lot of proof before they go after someone.

So I encourage the RIAA to file suit against every single person in the United States between the ages of 10 and 60. Leave it to each person to prove they have never copied a CD to their PC or MP3 player.

Maybe once this goes to its logical extreme, we can put this nonsense behind us and the recording industry can start thinking about how to better reach the people who love music so much, they’re willing to go to all this trouble to carry it with them everywhere.

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  • I'm Bob Crosley. Since 1995, I've been involved in the web and software development as a developer, project manager, program manager and product manager.
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