Music industry gets uppity

The recent victories of the Recording Industry Association of America seem to have gone to its head. Even though it succeeded in taking out an injunction against Napster's free trading of copyrighted MP3s, and has presented a large list to the

The recent victories of the Recording Industry Association of America seem to have gone to its head. Even though it succeeded in taking out an injunction against Napster's free trading of copyrighted MP3s, and has presented a large list to the embattled music swapping service, it now wants even more. Banning isn't good enough, it seems, and the RIAA wants instead to simply present a list to Napster not of music that it cannot trade, but of songs that it is allowed to swap.

This turn-around is no doubt borne out by the fact that there is a lot of work in banning, but not as much work in simply picking the old and un-interesting music that the RIAA is willing to let the public play with. The fact that the RIAA won, that it got to dictate terms, and now it's deciding those terms are too awkward is simply ludicrous.

To make matters worse the RIAA is also heating up its campaign against ISPs. For a while now the recording industry body has been snooping around the net, tracking notorious fileswappers and copyright dodgers; once upon a time it was happy with asking Napster to ban these super criminals of the music world, but that's not enough any more. Now the RIAA is asking ISPs to ban users at the source from swapping music, with the implied threat of legal action if the ISPs don't do the dirty work. Some might say that as ISPs will generally happily block someone who is trading kiddie porn, why don't they block someone who's trading Limp Bizkit MP3s? Well, for one thing, it's a matter of common decency on one hand, and a matter of a still ill-defined legal precedent on the other. The growing trend to get ISPs to other bodies' work for them is a disturbing one, but I'll rant about that one later.

While I don't think that Napster is entirely in the right, it is becoming more and more clear that the RIAA is even further away from right than Napster.
The Recording Industry Association of America