Poor RIAA. It just wants to keep recording artists (and especially labels!) free from the marauding hordes of pirate-minded bloggers, Web site operators, file sharers and random bootleggers.
Music bloggers for instance, take one or several individual tracks and write about them in great length, and they don't even pay royalties for the content. Well, now the RIAA is rightfully getting bloggers suspended by their hosting providers because of their wayward actions.
The RIAA also updated its royalty rates for Internet radio channels. Unlike normal radios, Interweb radios can be heard by people around the world. Some folks using fuzzy math worked out the fees to come out to 100 percent or more of total revenues, with one random blogger claiming a station with a thousand listeners would have to pay out $154,176 in royalties. That's fewer than eight thousand twenty-dollar T-shirts a year; those radio stations should just start cranking out the promo material!
Gizmodo, that abject blog fomenting an RIAA boycott this month, suggests you donate your hard-earned money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Why you would want to donate money to a nonprofit group purported to protect digital rights and not your local RNC is mind-boggling, to say the least.
Even the normally delightful comic Fox Trot is getting in on the act. Bill Amend, get back to having Jason using his iguana to terrorize his sister and not the RIAA.