Go get 'em, Jammie !!

There was an interesting article in today's paper about one Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a 32-year-old mother of four and self-described "huge music fan". Happily, in this electronic age, you can read the article here. The eye-popping statistic is that the RIAA goons have filed more than 30,000 copyright lawsuits, and Thomas-Rasset is one of the few who who have chosen to fight back instead settling out-of-court for an average of $3,500. It was also news to me that last December, RIAA announced it was dropping this brown-shirt tactic of slamming lawsuits on individual file-sharers.

Personally, I would never do anything as illegal as downloading songs. I think MP3 is the newest game console and Kazaa is a low-brow musical instrument. But if RIAA ever asked me to resolve the issue of file-swapping, here's what I'd tell them.

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Assemble an MP3 database similar to what Amazon.com offers, and charge users a flat fee of $20/month to legally download an unlimited amount of MP3 files. Heck, make it a yearly charge of $250.

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Yeah, everybody who signs up will download music like crazy for the first month. The problem is - you can only listen to one track at a time. So after awhile, those hundreds of MP3's you downloaded, but never listen to, are doing nothing more than taking up space on your hard drive. And they're not worth anything, because all your friends can legally download them as well.

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This concept may seem undo-able, but I remember the day AOL announced they were going to offer unlimited minutes of Internet access. After the initial round of snickers and predictions of AOL's demise, everybody else followed suit, and today those memories of carefully hoarding the 300-minutes-a-month ration are just a dusty mental cobweb.

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So wise up, RIAA. Accept the fact that you can't turn back file-sharing technology, and learn to live with it. I and tens-of-thousands of others will send you $250 annually and we can all do a group hug, sing a chorus of Kumbayah, and get back to what MP3-downloading is all about - promoting the bands and musicians.

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- UPDATE -

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Bummer. Jammie got nailed with a 1.92-million-dollar fine. Read all about it here. Which will of course be appealed. Good thing I don't download music files. (Whistles nervously) Good thing also that the RIAA has (said that they have) abandoned this gestapo tactic.