Music Industry to Unveil Amnesty Offer

[greedy_lars]

Music Industry to Unveil Amnesty Offer
2 hours, 34 minutes ago


By TED BRIDIS, AP Technology Writer

WASHINGTON - The recording industry is expected to announce as early as next week an amnesty program for people who admit they illegally share music files across the Internet, promising not to sue them in exchange for their admission and pledge to delete the songs off their computers.

The offer of amnesty will not apply to the roughly 1,600 people who already have been targets of copyright subpoenas from the Recording Industry Association of America , which has promised to file hundreds of infringement lawsuits across the country as early as next week.

Sources who described the proposal Thursday spoke on condition of anonymity. A spokeswoman for the RIAA, Amy Weiss, declined to comment.

The RIAA's offer would require Internet users to complete a notarized amnesty form that includes promises to delete any illegally downloaded music and not participate in illegal file-trading in the future. In exchange, the RIAA would agree not to file a potentially expensive infringement lawsuit.

"I'll be curious to see how many opt for this," said Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, who has criticized the RIAA's use of copyright subpoenas. "It will be an interesting measure of how much fear the recording industry has managed to inject into the American public."

Von Lohmann cautioned that the RIAA doesn't represent all copyright owners and therefore couldn't guarantee an Internet user wouldn't be sued for infringement by others, despite what amounts to an admission of guilt.

"It's not the kind of agreement that most people's lawyers will embrace," he said.

But the amnesty offer could serve to soften the RIAA's brass-knuckle image once the earliest lawsuits are filed, giving nervous college students and others an opportunity to avoid similar legal problems if they confess to online copyright infringement.



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[pod]

And you have to admit to doing something illegal. Just because the RIAA won't press charges, doesn't mean someone else wont. It's just another scare tactic, like SCO trolling Linux companies for UNIX licence royalties; a little pain now will save you lots down the road.

[Ðiego]

I'll give them amnesty..

They stop behaving as if they own all music and I'll stop calling them greedy bastards..


Ð

[theknife]

Each infringing household member will have to send a completed, notarized amnesty form to the RIAA, with a copy of a photo ID.

Recording Industry
Association of America

Dear P2P Filing Sharing Participant,

Greetings.

This a friendly notice (subpoena) from the Recording Industry of America to let you know that we will be pressing charges against you for illegally trading our property online.

That’s right. Put down the Red Bull, scream “Holyshitmotherfucker!” as one long, unintelligible word and start saving your summer job wages, because we’re coming to collect.

Of course, we realize that after receiving this letter, you may have doubts about the lengths of our penises. Our act of sending out more than 900 subpoenas could be interpreted by some therapitsts to be an effort to shore up our waning masculinity—a litigious “beating of the chest,” if you will.

This is not true. For the record, we’re very wealthy. Though many of us were not endowed at birth with a massive and throbbing manhood, we have been able to augment our pantspackers through the use of highly experimental and expensive plastic surgery.

However, for some recording industry executives (most of us) the sheer “lack of material to work with” can prohibit such a surgery. For these individuals we have hired David Copperfield to produce elaborate visual illusions, which cause the average tiny record executive penis to appear nearly as large as Laurence Fishburne. (Not his penis, but the actor himself.)


Using a patented combination of mirrors, a fog machine, and two Hebrew National Brand Ballpark Beef Franks, Mr. Copperfield is able to give the average recording industry executive the illusion of 2-3 more meters in length, and 1/2 meter in added girth—a quite remarkable achievement capable of impressing the most skeptical Los Angles prostitute, or even Elizabeth Hurley.

These illusions are portable and designed to fold into briefcase-sized enclosures which are easily carried from one sexual encounter to another. They even fit in an overhead luggage rack for handy availability on cross-country flights, or into the tiny trunks of our Porche Boxters.

Of course, this technology is not inexpensive. And so, we’re asking you to pay up for all the music you’ve been stealing.

Sincerely,
The RIAA
.