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Copyright infringement is copyright infringement

There's a difference & I know you know better. Come on, now. You don't make the RIAA's case any better when you mischaracterize a civil offense to be a criminal one.

I do not condone illegal file-sharing, but there's a clear difference here that the law has not grown to address. Throwing around terms like 'theft' just doesn't help. If one breaks into a store & physically robs something, then the owner is deprived of a physical product. In the case of a copy being created, the owner is not deprived of their original. None of this has been successfully defined yet, so it's a muddy debate, but one that's important enough to deserve to not be distorted even further with terms that do not apply. The natural course is for someone to inevitably step up with the point of how much credibility the RIAA deserves in the debate given the many foibles, especially the illegal ones, that its members have themselves been involved in...for decades.

I follow blogs like http://www.drmwatch.com/ and

http://www.recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/

fairly regularly. It's a shame that Sarah Seabury Ward didn't elect to do what the Santangelos & Lindors & Fosters have done. I'd be 100% behind the lawsuits if it were based on something less flimsy then IP addresses, which, as attested to in the deposition of the RIAA witness in the Lindor case, can be spoofed. Which seems to happen on this site on a regular basis, by the way.

In cases like Santangelo, when the RIAA realizes that they're wrong & have no chance to win, they attempt to simply drop the suit. In that case, though, the court is forcing them to at least cover the legal fees of the defendant in a case that should never have been brought.

The guys crying theft aren't even willing to compensate those for their costs when their suits are shown to be dead wrong. You're cheerleading for them. I trust that doesn't feel so good, does it? It won't get better if the few details surrounding the lawsuit filed against John Paladuk turn out to be an accurate representation of that situation.

Leave it to copyright infringement, if you would. As a man of reason, I would think you would agree that this seemingly minor difference is actually massive. As I'm sure you're aware, the vast majority of those being sued are settling. That's all fine & well. They should. But even one of these suits are simply unacceptable. Suing people without computers? People who don't know enough to use encryption on their routers? I understand that a person should be responsible for what goes on on their box in their home. But if someone glommed off their internet access? Spoofed their IP address?

You might respond that what I'm discussing here is one in a thousand. I don't care if it's one in a f*cking million. Unacceptable. Period. Maybe not if we're talking about an industry known for its ethics, but, again, we don't have to go there. Wait...Sony rootkit? Cheap Trick/Allmans' litigation? Sorry. Couldn't resist.

Meanwhile, I read a post by a frustrated CUSTOMER who purchased a CD...which was so DRM'd up the wazoo that his computer--a Mac--wouldn't even play it. From what I gathered, returning it wasn't even an option. Then I found this. I'd be interested to know if you'll still cry theft after reading this post--and, if you do, who exactly it is you'd be accusing.

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