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I hate to make predictions anyone else can make, but it's starting to smell like the beginning of the end for the RIAA and their shady tactics.

Not that you are capable of understanding this, but copyright is NOT an absolute. The copyright as we know it now is a recent 'invention' and was introduced in response to technological changes (music recordings). Is it that strange to rethink copyright again now technologie has once again changed the world?

To give an example, before the printing press was invented, the only way to spread written texts was by copying them. Someone, monks in the west, sat down, and simply copied an existing work word for word. That was the only way to make more then one copy, unless the original author fancied writing all the copies himself.

There was no such thing as copyright, you had the original author and book, and people copied that work for distribution.

This changed with the inventing of the press, all of a sudden an original work could be turned out in any number desired (more or less). This changed the name of the game, as all of a sudden you had a new industry, that of the printing press (publishers if you like) who could take works and reprint them and sell them at volumes large enough to make a business. Before that books were simply to rare and expensive for all but the most powerfull to posses.

With music this mattered, before a composer who wrote a piece of music had one copy of it. If someone wanted another copy of it, they had to deal with the composer, distribution was limited. When printing of sheet music became possible all of sudden a piece of music was worth more then just the money you could get from performing it, you could write music and sell it without ever touching an instrument. The music industry had been born.

It is hard for us to imagine, but once people traded music sheets as eagerly as we trade MP3's.

Times changed again when music itself could be recorded, first by automatic instruments, later the music performance itself.

Over this time, the music industry (the people selling others people work) and the artists and the composers have been in a constant struggle as to who should receive what amount of money. The original sheet publishers offcourse preffered to simply take the music, or pay a mininal one time fee, and collect all the profits they could. The performers want to just pay a minimal fee at most and be damned how many times they perform it or how much they get paid for it, the composer wants to see money for each copy sold and each performance.

All this eventually, over many changes led to copyright as we know it now. The best you can say for it, is that it kept everyone quiet. Not exactly content, but quiet.

But things changed, tech moved on once again and deeply cut for the first time into the publishers, all of sudden you didn't need a huge press anymore, (either to print books OR press vinyl/CD's etc) but end customers could reproduce music easily on their own. In a way going back to the original situation where if you wanted a copy of something, you made it.

The industry seems to have responded by making copyright even stricter, seemingly wanting to expand the lifespan to infinite, this despite the fact that for instance Disney is famous for NOT paying for the copyrighted works of others who just happen to fall outside that new protection, Pinocio was famously released JUST after the copyright expired.

But the main question is this, why should we keep a law that has been recently introduced to deal with changing tech, now that tech has changed again? Copyright is NOT a natural thing, it is something invented by lawyers to product an industry, why should we as a society keep it if we no longer need it, want it.

Once there was a law that required a man with a red flag to walk in front of a motorised vehicle, that was introcued to protect the horse carriage industry. We changed it when it became clear that new tech of the automobile had made the horse obsolete. That industry was simply forced to adopt or die. Why should the music industry not do the same.

and if you cry out, but that would mean, no

I'm sure I'll be modded down by the groupthink moderators here, but really, is this the outcome we're all rooting for? Ignoring copyrights?

The RIAA has a right to legally defend their copyrights. They do not have a right to bypass the law or take shortcuts to do so. Also they must go after the right person. There have been many cases where they did not pursue the correct individual and did not care. They have said as much.

"When you fish with a net, you sometimes are going to catch a few dolphin," Weiss helpfully explained to me. "But we also realize that this cybershoplifting needs to stop."

If one of my neighbors takes my morning paper every morning do I sue them all and drop the cases when I narrow it down to a suspect. Also do I have exparte communications with the judge to get all of their financial statements? And then I realize that the neighbor I did sue has been away visiting relatives for a month, should I not then drop the suit or continue with it? The RIAA has done the opposite of reason, fairness, and common sense in every case unless there was negative media on them.