The RIAA's Head Weasel Speaks His Piece

ArsTechnica recently gave RIAA General Counsel Steven Marks space to talk up his organization's goon-squad anti-piracy tactics:

It is a fascinating and challenging time to work in the music business. The record industry is swept up in a sea of change and we have embraced it. It’s a new day for the business and a new day for fans—25 years ago, it was just radio and records, but today’s music marketplace is dramatically different, with hundreds of different fully licensed digital music services and models.

Yet even with this emerging legal landscape, the rights of artists, songwriters, and record labels deserve protection. Unfortunately, there are those who seem to overlook that fact, including a Harvard law school professor, his class, and their client Joel Tenenbaum, a defendant in one of our illegal music downloading cases.

Marks is referring here to an earlier Ars piece, in which Harvard Law Professor Charles Nesson basically declared war on the RIAA. Nesson, along with many of his students, are now representing Tannenbaum pro bono.

This is funny stuff, although not really in a "ha ha" funny kind of way. The RIAA, after all, represents an industry that "embraced" change only after Napster, BitTorrent, and millions of consumers chain-whipped its business model into a bloody pulp.

Today, the RIAA's "embrace" of change includes a lingering obsession with digital rights management schemes and some curious ideas about how to price digital versus physical content. Also, let's not forget the music industry's kinky habit of suing dead people, old ladies with a thang for Snoop Dogg, and various other hardened copyright criminals.

If the RIAA wants to lift its leg on music buyers and tell them it's raining, that's their prerogative. After all, this is the industry that put the term "payola" into the history books. I just hope they don't think that anyone capable of fogging a knife takes them seriously at this point.