So it may come as a surprise that I support the RIAA in their latest vow to rid the world of criminal copyists by directly going after those who commercially abuse their copyrights.

If some one is stealing their copyrighted material and profiting from marketing it, of course they have the right to go after the culprits and capture and prosecute them. Stealing is wrong and always has been.

However the RIAA has shown no sensitivity to the rights of others in their own useless pursuit of keeping their business model afloat in a society that has passed it by. In their wake they have passed such hideous and counter-productive laws such as the DMCA to defend their shrinking kingdom.

The DMCA is critical for the RIAA, for it is only this flimsy law, rooted in the power of rich industries to influence Congress, that permits the old business model to continue in the light of Internet technology.

One would logically think that the owner of so many protected works with the money to modify their delivery systems from ancient physical delivery systems to modern convenient online delivery to the home computer and/or electronic home entertainment systems would have no problems in seeing that a change to a new business model would only continue its operation and dominance into the future.

The software industry, for example, started down the protection path, but now seem to understand that market forces preclude over the top remedies. But it seems that the industry is really in the business of delivering physical disks which only incidentally contain music.

The old business model will no longer work. Even the musicians themselves see the light that RIAA has cast a blind eye towards. People can now get music directly from the musicians much better without the RIAA than from the RIAA themselves. Down loading is quicker and more convenient. And it no longer costs millions of dollars to create a site to provide music. But rather than noticing this, the RIAA pig headedly and doggedly refuse to embrace this new technology and instead try to force the public to adhere to the old model.

But the pubic will not be forced. Even the DMCA will eventually be changed or reversed. Today millions of people are downloading music illegally rather than put up with the difficult task of getting their music the old fashioned way. If this many people are willing to do something illegal then it is the law and not the people that is wrong. And the law won't stay on the wrong side of the equation forever. It will soon be changed - industry money is essentially used by politicians to buy votes and once the people insist that their elected politicians vote to remove this foolish law, it will be done.

Ordinarily I wouldn't care if an industry had chosen death over change, but in their death throes the RIAA came up with the DMCA which has lead to many abuses well beyond those of the music industry itself.

The DMCA has abridged the traditional right to reverse-engineer technology and has lead to scientific papers not being published. Even worse, it has formed the basis for additional law suits of unrelated reverse engineering by legally retrofitting arguments to match up to the sloppily worded statute.

In fiddling with the copyright statues, the RIAA has changed the rules for fair use. Fair use is now unfair use. Rights to skip commercials or time shift viewing was already a legal fair use right. But now these legal right are being taken away but new devices which hide behind the DMCA to keep the public from exercising their fair use rights. And any attempt to modify your legally purchased and owned devices are illegal. Its a legal catch 22 that will turn honest citizens into criminals.

Musicians themselves have realized that the middleman in today's music distribution model is really just an interloper and have begun selfpublishing on the Internet. But rather than seeing the foolishness of their ways, the RIAA seeks only more foolishness. Their attempts to close down P2P file sharing services has failed. So now they are considering legalizing vigilantism by copyright holders against citizens computers. But I suspect that they realize that although they get get a congressman or senator to support them, asking the entire congress and supreme court to support this violence is probably beyond even their reach.

So now, as if it is not enough to make the common people legal criminals in their own minds, RIAA intends to actually prosecute the individuals who use the services.

I celebrate this for two reasons. First, this is the proper way for them to proceed and they should have chosen it first if they indeed intended to carry their folley through the courts. Using pre-existing laws and going after those who were using their property to make money would have been understandable and supported by society in general. Second, this is the quickest and most public way to expose their antics. Back street and closed room machinations don't fare well in the light of day. In light of their past actions I am sure that they will sue innocent individuals and expose themselves to more ridicule until the public finally has had enough.

This is the last game - they will either sell their ideas to the public or be repudiated. Once the public sees how low they are willing to go, boycotts and rejection will join technology advance to doom the RIAA as an organization. The result will be chaos quickly calmed by the rise of new delivery systems which will both compensate the musician and make music readily available to the public. SO LET THE GAME BEGIN!

-Murrel Rhodes