Writing in the Washington Post today, Marc Fisher observes, "Despite more than 20,000 lawsuits filed against music fans in the years since they started finding free tunes online rather than buying CDs from record companies, the recording industry has utterly failed to halt the decline of the record album or the rise of digital music sharing link here.

"Still, hardly a month goes by without a news release from the industry's lobby, the Recording Industry Association of America, touting a new wave of letters to college students and others demanding a settlement payment and threatening a legal battle."

He then goes to describe the case of "Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer." Howell is fighting the case.

The problem here is that plenty of legal precedent exists that what Howell did is within his fair use rights. Once again, the RIAA is trying to extend the reach of copyright, at which it has so far been very successful. But Fisher concludes by noting that the "RIAA's legal crusade against its customers is a classic example of an old media company clinging to a business model that has collapsed."

Know hope!

In following the Washington Post, I seem to have made an error in this posting, as pointed out by Mike Masnick link here. In a previous post that I missed, he wrote,

"While we know that the RIAA is constantly pushing to extend both the meaning and scope of copyright law, in this case the details were pretty clear that they were not going after Howell for just ripping his CDs, but for putting those ripped files into a shared Kazaa folder. Now you can (and we do!) disagree that simply putting files into a shared folder are infringement, but that's different than just claiming that ripping the CDs is illegal or that he was being targeted just for ripping the CDs."link here.

He has a few other wise things to say on the subject, so read them both.