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Let the happy dances begin! Here’s a good opportunity for every single person out there who’s ever said “I’d buy music if it were cheaper/if the money went straight to the artists/if there wasn’t DRM crap in the digital version” to put up some cash.

Have you got five bucks handy? For a whopping five dollars, you can buy a downloadable copy of Nine Inch Nails’ newest release, Ghosts. This is straight from the artist, folks — a legitimate purchase, and a lawful copy that’s all yours.

Well, I suppose we should have expected this, but it’s still disgusting to actually see it come to light. In its ever-increasingly desperate efforts to convince the world that a person who downloads a copy of a copyrighted song is the worst kind of criminal in existence, the idiots at the RIAA have concocted a feature-length film (!) aimed at law enforcement agents, suggesting that intensifying prosecution of “pirates” will lead them to more “tantalizing” targets, like drug dealers, thieves, and terrorists.

Though they didn’t mention the term “Nazi” directly, did the RIAA just Godwin itself out of this argument? They’ve obviously made two bad mistakes here:

1. By suggesting that following the “antics” of a music pirate, law enforcement might find evidence of other crimes, like drug dealing, terrorism, etc., haven’t they just admitted that “stealing music electronically” lands really low on the priority list for reasonable law enforcement efforts?
2. They’ve just implied that every person who has ever downloaded a piece of music without tithing to the music industry is a terrorist. It’s a cheap shot, and it’s also pretty shitty. Methinks even more “everyday people” will see this steaming pile of bullshit for what it’s worth, even more so than the eyebrows that get raised whenever the RIAA sues a child or a grandparent.

Read some other opinions on the matter so you don’t just think I’m a wingnut Also, it shouldn’t surprise anybody at all that the Pirate Bay has already, well, pirated a copy of this video from the RIAA. Grab your copy here.

• A Wired article on the subject.
• Slashdot.org covers the issue.

I laugh hysterically at the MPAA as I write this, since they’ve just been caught (and called out) committing a breach of copyright law.

When you are crusading against the American public for “rampant acts of piracy,” suing your own customers for pirating movies, you probably shouldn’t rip off a copy of Ubuntu, mutate it to have your name, logos, and “approved software” on it, and redistribute it without honoring the license (the GPL) it’s released under.

You also shouldn’t sue your bread & butter customers either, but the MPAA isn’t known for doing smart things.