Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I am not a person in a position of authority. I am not a professional writer. This article pertains to the United States of America but may be germane to other countries due to international laws and trade agreements.

The article I wrote a few days ago, Downloading Pirated Anything Is NOT Illegal, drew way more attention than I anticipated. Had I a clue as to the intensity of debatable territory I was treading on, I would have done one of two things. Either I would have refrained from writing it at all or I would have paid much more attention to how I worded it. It drew a lot of criticism and hostility. Apparently, however, there were many people who agreed with my point of view. As of the time of this writing, the article has been read more than 19,000 times, Digg users have "dugg" it more than 3,100 times and there are STILL people reading it, right now.

Whether I was right or wrong in my assumptions, the issue of downloading pirated material shouldn't be what we're focused on. We should be attacking the things the RIAA is doing right now, things that are sanctioned by government officials who reside in the back pockets of the record labels, subverting the purpose of copyright law in the first place. If we don't stop the RIAA, other industry lawyers will copy their new business strategy of sue first, ask questions later.

There are a lot of Americans that either don't know or are apathetic about the situation the RIAA has put a lot of hard-working Americans into, including themselves. It is for this very reason that everyone who reads this needs to write about it, both online and off. Link to this article, plagiarize it or even copy it word for word, you'll get no arguments from me.

The US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 states the Congress shall have power "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". This is the basis for copyright law in the US. Petitioners in the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft (2003) argued unsuccessfully that successive retroactive extensions of copyright were functionally unlimited and violated the limited times language of the clause. Only the naive would believe that a copyright term amounting to the life of the author plus 95 years has the effect of anything less than unlimited. The constitutional clause was obviously designed to reward authors and inventors for their works only until they were compensated in a just manner. As the copyright law stands today, it does much more than that. It secures a permanent income source and stifles innovation.

A few short years ago, the RIAA decided to use the DMCA for its own agenda and to begin suing consumers for copyright infringement. They start by offering to settle out of court for a disclosed amount. If the accused refuses, the lawsuit proceeds. This sounds a lot like extortion to me. So far, the RIAA has sued over 20,000 people and settled with more than 2,000 of them. Some who settled were not guilty of anything but having Internet access and settled simply because fighting in court would have been much more costly.

The RIAA is notorious for suing dead people, children, college students, and people who don't even own computers. Who's next, unborn babies? It doesn't matter if it's within their legal rights to sue anyone, their actions are both ethically and morally wrong. The RIAA wouldn't be drawing the criticism it so richly deserves if it took the time to consider the consequences of its actions (such as causing families to file for bankruptcy protection). Expecting all consumers to abide by copyright law when the law is convoluted enough to confuse lawyers is a risky position to take. Perhaps it's the reason the RIAA continues to lose lawsuits when the defendants actually fight back.

When a challenge to the constitutionality of a law that is unfair and unjust and serves only to make the rich richer fails to change that law, Americans have no recourse but to resort to civil disobedience. If that doesn't have any effect, more drastic measures are required. Are any of you up to the challenge? Perhaps a revolution could change this and a few other injustices being perpetrated in America today.

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