Intellectual Defenestration

No More CD's

P. Diddy spends $400,000 a week to party on his yacht and sends his kid to a school that runs over $25k a year. Ashanti shows up at the VMA with earrings valued at $3 million.

And so RIAA goes after a 12 year old girl living in a housing project (obviously not someone with the resources to hire an expensive lawyer and defend herself) and makes her mother pay $2000.

I don't think I can really convey my disgust at this. Granted, illegal file sharing is wrong and probably hurting the industry (otherwise P. Diddy could have gone for the $50k/yr school). But there seem to be other reasons why they are losing money. At the very least, there has to be something better than prosecuting 12 year old girls.

I'm guessing that their strategy is to hope that the initial anger at what they are doing will fade in time, but the lesson to not download songs illegally will stay and so their sales will be back up soon. I don't know if that will happen or not. For now, my CD buying is on an indefinite hiatus.

September 9, 2003 09:35 PM