I just got e-mail from somebody waiting with bated-breath for my comments on
this.

I wasn’t even gonna say a thing.  This is irrelevant.  The kind of pyrrhic
victory Mitch Bainwol and his bunch of disinformation flunkies trumpet in the
media to illustrate their ongoing victory in the battle against file-trading,
when they’re losing as badly as the U.S. did in Vietnam, and appears to be in
Iraq, since they’re following a flawed STRATEGY!

The guys who ran Grokster were scumbags.  The U.S. Supreme Court thought so. 
That’s why they ruled against the company.  But, they left a GIANT HOLE! 
What if you’re not distributing P2P software to profit off the illegal trading of
copyrighted materials, THEN WHAT?  What if you’re a hacker in your basement,
who just wants to fuck with the RIAA, and isn’t interested in making a penny. 
There’s NOTHING in the Grokster ruling that will stop you.  In other words,
the issue of the legality of this behavior must be litigated ALL OVER AGAIN! 
And how long is that gonna take, at a minimum, THREE YEARS?  While people
continue to steal the music every fucking day?

But it gets worse.  Grokster the COMPANY shut down, but the software lives
on.  On the computers of TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE!  Who can distribute it to
others VIA Grokster, never mind other P2P services, or hard drives, or USB
flash, or DVD, or CD, or IM, or floppy.  THIS is the war the RIAA is fighting, one
with a CHANGED LANDSCAPE!

But it gets worse.  That iTunes Music Store the RIAA companies trot out as
their savior?

It’s anything but.

How about this report…

Apple’s IPod Success

You can’t stop people from trading music.  Absolutely impossible.  EVERYTHING
can be ripped via analog means, EASILY, and then distributed freely
digitally.  Via all the means I delineated above.  The key is to focus on the easiest
way to distribute music and monetize that.  Which is what Thomas Middelhoff
attempted to do by funding the original Napster.

But other majors sued to shut the company down.  And then sued for copyright
infringement damages.  Assuming they win, whatever monies they recover will be
DWARFED by whatever would have been collected by licensing Napster and
charging people to trade music for the past SIX YEARS!

Whatever money I had six years ago I’ve spent.  I’ve got the music I
downloaded from Napster, but you can’t get it from me now, because the
money’s all gone.

The labels want to keep the old paradigm in place.  While trying to build a
new system, via iTunes and/or Yahoo/Napster/Rhapsody, they’re leaving BILLIONS
on the table.  Meanwhile, not even a million people are subscribing to each of
the tethered download services.  In any other industry this would be
considered a colossal failure and purveyors would seek new means of distribution. 
Only in the record business, where non-tech-savvy baby boomers make decisions
based on decades-old models, is this untrue.

Kids and twentysomethings may not control record companies, but they DO
control the Internet, they DO control the modern means of distribution.  Keep
alienating them, keep delivering what they don’t want, keep suing them.  As Dr.
Phil would say, IS IT WORKING FOR YOU?