If you browse to http://grokster.com/, you’ll get an amusingly stern warning about piracy:

The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed
that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal.
Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files
using unauthorized peer-to-peer services is illegal and is
prosecuted by copyright owners.

There are legal services for downloading music and movies.
This service is not one of them.

YOUR IP ADDRESS IS [insert your IP address here] AND HAS BEEN LOGGED.
Don’t think you can’t get caught. You are not anonymous.

Amusingly, if they check through those very same logs, they’ll see my own response to that steaming pile of bullshit (if they’re logging “referer” headers anyway.

There are a number of problems with the statement itself, and the threat it carries.

First, the statement contradicts itself — “The SCOTUS unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal,” yet it then goes on to imply that “this service is illegal”. Well, no, it isn’t. First, there’s no fucking service offered on the site anyway (Grokster was sued and destroyed by the RIAA, sadly enough, and this web site is now owned by those very same bastards). Second, you could download legitimate content on Grokster. Whether anyone ever did that or not is irrelevant; you could do so, and doing so was not illegal, and using the service to do so was not illegal.

Next up, we have the implication that just going to the web site is cause enough to sue me for copyright infringement. Any RIAA agent reading this post, please pay close attention to the following statement: Browsing to a website is not illegal and does not constitute infringement. Fuck you. Deep and hard. With a blunt instrument. I browsed to Grokster.com yet I did not download (nor did I attempt to download) any copyrighted material. Get that through your fucking skulls, assholes.

To everyone else reading this angry rant, don’t be scared by these modern-day terrorists. Nothing they do is intended to “protect artists” or “preserve rights.” It is all a mad dash to stop the dying recording industry from bleeding out entirely — it’s one last grab for cash before we render the old way obsolete entirely.

Throw down your DRM-encumbered music players, use free software instead of Windows, stop buying CDs and DVDs (unless they’re blanks for your own use storing things you lawfully obtain and enjoy yourself), and tell everyone you know to do the same. They only have power because we give them power — every dollar we spend on their products is used to sue us. This enemy has no teeth that we don’t give it. Stop doing it.

I think the RIAA envisions a world where everybody will just magically stop pirating and cheerfully pay $20 per CD, $20 per DVD, $15 per movie ticket (for every movie in every theater), and will pay a stipend of $1 or $2 every single time any digital copy of any copyrighted work is played back on any kind of device, per listener.

I don’t see that world ever springing into existence. We citizens may well stop pirating one day — but we’ll move on to something else. We won’t ever come back to the RIAA (or MPAA). We’ll buy CDs directly from the artists. We’ll buy DVDs directly from the people who made the movie. We’ll freely download freely-distributable material from its creators, and we will pay them what we think it’s worth. The world will be a much more entertaining place. And maybe we won’t have a new fucking “New Kids on the Block” every other year once that new world is born.