RIAA Hits a Sour Note With Its File-Sharing Witch Hunt

If I were a big-shot L.A. music mogul, Jammie Thomas would not be my ideal poster child as the face of illegal file sharing.
Thomas, you’ll recall, was convicted last week in a Duluth, Minnesota, court for violating copyright law by making a couple of dozen songs available to the multitudes. For this she was ordered to pay the recording industry $222,000 in damages, and she could lose even more to court costs and appeals.

All because she was among the 26,000 people sued by those Brioni suits known collectively as the Recording Industry Association of America, and hers was the first case to actually reach trial. The RIAA, faced with plummeting CD sales and increasingly restive artists, wanted to “send a message” to all the lowlifes out there who download music for free and undercut their profit margins.

The message, apparently, is this: “We’re idiots."

[tags]RIAA, Music, file sharing[/tags]