Attorney Ray Beckerman reports at /. and at his blog that after the defendant’s success in Capitol v. Foster, other defendants are following Foster’s lead and demanding attorney’s fees from the RIAA. If every defendant in these frivolous RIAA lawsuits filed a counterclaim for attorney’s fees, the RIAA would go bankrupt. The music industry is abusing the civil justice system to extort money from its customers. It is up to those customers to create a financial incentive to make them stop.
Downloading music from the internet is no different from recording a song that is playing on the radio. Time-shifting and location-shifting are both fair-use rights that apply to copyrighted material in general, regardless of the method of transmission. If a song has ever been broadcast over the public airwaves in the United States, every American should have the right to download it for free.
