Will the RIAA die in '08?
even a 12-year-old girl in public housing? — The RIAA is NOT suing a music-lover who ripped from legally purchased CDs. Yep, this outfit is Scrooge Central, but the earlier reports were wrong …
Context & Ripple Effects
The RIAA ends 2007 battered by its own legal paper trail. Its litigation campaign against file-sharers has escalated all year — the Lime Wire suit filed back in 2006, a $220,000 jury verdict won against an individual trader in October, and an attempt to shut down Usenet access the same month. Then on December 11 the trade group put in writing, via court filings in the Jeffery Howell case, its view that MP3s ripped from legally purchased CDs count as unauthorized copies.
That filing detonated over the holiday week: TechCrunch framed the RIAA's target for 2008 as essentially everyone — including a 12-year-old in public housing — before Engadget and this piece noted the RIAA insists it is NOT suing anyone merely for ripping owned CDs. The contradiction between what its lawyers argue in court and what its press operation denies publicly is precisely why commentators are asking whether the organization itself survives 2008.
First-order effects
- In the Jeffery Howell case, the RIAA's December 11 brief asserting that ripped MP3s remain 'unauthorized copies' now sits in direct tension with its public claim that it does not sue over CD ripping — handing the defense a documented inconsistency to exploit.
- The RIAA takes immediate reputational damage: the walk-back confirms to critics that its legal position on personal copying really is as aggressive as the 'Scrooge Central' framing suggests, even where no suit follows.
Second-order effects
- Labels funding the RIAA face a widening gap between an enforcement strategy their own filings defend and a publicity strategy that keeps retreating from it — every retraction weakens the deterrence value the lawsuits were meant to create.
- Digital music sellers and device makers gain marketing room: when the industry's lawyers blur what customers may legally do with a purchased disc, rivals can win buyers simply by promising fewer strings on files people already own.
Third-order effects
- If individual-targeting suits keep producing headline-grabbing verdicts while alienating the paying public, the pressure grows on member labels to move enforcement away from suing listeners and toward licensing-driven business models — raising a genuine structural question about what the RIAA's role becomes if litigation stops paying.
- The episode sharpens a longer-running legitimacy fight over personal-copying rights: trade-group legal positions that run ahead of what consumers regard as fair use invite exactly the backlash cycle playing out here, and regulators and courts become the arbiters rather than the industry.
The trend: Record-industry enforcement is straining under its own maximalism, with each court filing that treats ordinary customer behavior as infringement eroding the trade group's standing faster than the lawsuits recoup losses.