First the good news: the Recording Industry Association of America claims it'll stop the ridiculous John Doe lawsuits which have caused them an enormous amount of bad publicity and turned them into one of the most hated organizations, well, anywhere.

I can now finally erase this topic from my list of stuff we should stop talking about, but does this make RIAA any less evil? Unfortunately, no. They're simply refocusing on pressuring ISPs to punish their users whenever RIAA decides they deserve it. You're sharing music over the internet? They'll monitor you, they'll hunt you down, and they'll (at least that's one of the suggestions I'm seeing) take away your access to the Internet.

I wrote, at length, what I think about private corporations pressuring ISPs to remove (under any conditions) people's right to access the Internet. In a word: it's bad. Secondly, I maintain the (possibly controversial) position that not all file sharing and not all music sharing can inherently be called illegal or immoral, and that many corporations that own rights over intellectual property have gone way too far in defining certain activities as illegal; a good example is Sony's publicly stated position that copying your own CD to your computer is illegal. Finally, I definitely maintain the position that monitoring people's activities on the Internet by private, for-profit corporations under any circumstances is a horrible idea.

This is just a PR move from RIAA. They've realized (it took them a while, though) that suing your own customers is not getting them anywhere, especially if they turn out to be dead people or 13-year old girls. So, they've decided on a more systemic approach, which has worked quite well in certain countries: pressure on the ISPs to do the dirty work for them. Again, the RIAA and its members simply refuse to adapt their business model to the new situation brought forth by the Internet; instead, they try to change the way we use the Internet, which, hopefully, will never work. People will adapt, and start using various techniques which will make it hard for anyone to monitor their activities online, I'm sure of it. I wonder what the industry will think of then, if they don't go bankrupt in the meantime?