Commafuckers Versus The Commons
Record executives didn’t just shoot themselves in the foot, they shot themselves in the face, over and over again. They got (nominally) advanced democracies to pass laws that would permanently terminate your whole family’s internet connection if anyone in your household was accused of illegal downloading.
The argued that any service that allowed you to search for music by the artist’s name should be banned. They told people they were fools to expect to be able to buy digital tracks and play them forever, defending the idea that the music you buy should simply expire off your hard-drive in a couple of years. And when academics criticized them online, they tried to get them fired from their universities.
And more than anything, they sued music fans. They sued and sued and sued. At one point, one in fifty federal cases in the USA was a record company suing a fan. They weren’t just looking for money, either. The RIAA wanted to send a message — which is why they demanded that one of their targets drop out of his Computer Science major as a condition of the settlement: people like you shouldn’t learn how to program computers.
-Commafuckers Versus The Commons: Copyleft Trolls Are the Serpents in Our Garden of Ethical Sharing