Alrighty folks,
Today's Tomland article is brought to you by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). Over the weekend the RIAA won a lawsuit against a single mother for $220,000. The crime?... Possibly sharing 24 songs over the Internet. If you do the math, that's an award of $9,166 per song.
First of all, I'd like to point out that I hate the RIAA. With only a few cents of every dollar actually going to artists, this organization represents all that is greedy, wrong, and stupid with big business.
Just look at the size of the award; $220,000?!?!?! iTunes sells songs for 99 cents. So for 24 songs we're looking at $23.76 plus tax. Now even if some people downloaded the song from her computer (which the RIAA did not prove in their case). It would have had to be downloaded over 200,000 times in order to come up with actual losses of $220,000. The RIAA did not prove this either.
Finally, only a fraction of people who download songs for free would buy them otherwise. So we're not even looking at a dollar-for-dollar loss here.
Sure copyright is important, and sure artists need to make money but IF you wind up doing something illegal and get caught the punishment needs to fit the crime....
Greedy corporations forcing people into bankruptcy for something that cost 99 cents.... NOT TOMLAND APPROVED.
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