from the "It's a dessert topping! no, it's a floorwax!" school of mp3 discussion on Slashdot:

"You might remember George Ziemann as the musician who found his own music banned from eBay because it was recorded on CD-R. Now he's back with a new rant about the RIAA's statistics, which blame piracy for the dire condition of the music industry... (As an interesting side note, Ziemann says that songs are really just ads for CDs, and thus should be freely traded.)"

If you read down a little bit (filter at level 2), you can see just how easy the line starts to blur between artists copyright protection, their ability to make money form CD sales, the RIAA's incresingly shrill "piracy" legal posturing and the labels inability to see the forest for the trees. Don't get me started on the sins of major labels ;)

BTW, is it me or is the RIAA just unable to react in a way that doesn't make them look like idiots?

Update: this link via Boing Boing from The Daily Princetonian by Fred von Lohmann -- a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Suing college students. Forcing ISPs to rat out customers. Petitioning Congress for unprecedented vigilante powers. Deploying armies of lawyers to sue technology companies. Threatening universities and corporations. Demanding that ISPs disconnect tens of thousands of Internet users. Hiring electronic enforcers to monitor computer users.

None of these efforts by the recording industry has put a single nickel into the pockets of a musician. And none of these efforts has slowed the spread of peer-to-peer ("P2P") file sharing. More Americans have used file-sharing software than voted for the President.

there's more to read...