Moby has called for the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) to be disbanded after it sued an illegal file sharer for £1.92 million dollars.
Jammie Thomas-Rasset was instructed by a federal jury to pay $1.92 million for willful infringement of the recording industry’s copyrights. The Minnesotan mother had posted 24 songs on Kazaa, a file-sharing site.
Moby has long held a progressive attitude to music and technological developments and was moved to issue the following statement on his website:
“the riaa have sued Jammie Thomas-Rasset of minnesota for $2,000,000 for illegally downloading music.
argh. what utter nonsense. this is how the record companies want to protect themselves? suing suburban moms for listening to music? charging $80,000 per song?
punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business. maybe the record companies have adopted the ‘it’s better to be feared than respected’ approach to dealing with music fans. i don’t know, but ‘it’s better to be feared than respected’ doesn’t seem like such a sustainable business model when it comes to consumer choice. how about a new model of ‘it’s better to be loved for helping artists make good records and giving consumers great records at reasonable prices’?
i’m so sorry that any music fan anywhere is ever made to feel bad for making the effort to listen to music.
the riaa needs to be disbanded.
moby”
