Surprise, the RIAA has a blog and yes it’s boring and biased

When one things of the Recording Industry Association of America, otherwise known among other names as the RIAA, is well known for questionable legal actions and suing old women and single mothers. The last thing that most of us would think when it comes to the organization is that they would take up blogging.

Well they have and you can find their blog called Music Notes here.

This appears to be a fairly new blog as there are only eight posts but you can already see that this is just going to be another avenue for them to spin their crap. Here’s samples of the content that you will expect to find on the blog.

Here We Are

Jammie Thomas-Rasset Part Deux, Day 1. An encouraging first day. After a morning of jury selection, the jury was seated by lunch (five men, seven women) and opening arguments kicked off the afternoon. We’re very pleased with the jury. My favorite highlight of the day was the juror who, during jury selection process, noted that he used LimeWire once to get music illegally – but stopped immediately because he “didn’t want to get caught and be here.” How’s THAT for deterrence value of our lawsuit program?? Doesn’t get much better than that folks…

Posted: June 15, 2009

1700 songs later: The Thomas-Rasset II Verdict

By now everyone knows what the verdict was. It’s fair to say that the damages were unexpected given the size of the award in the previous trial. But when it comes down to it, the jury heard a case about Ms. Thomas-Rasset distributing more than 1700 songs to potentially millions of people – not merely downloading 24 songs. We will settle this case if she allows it. We’ve always wanted to settle this case. But she has consistently refused, which has led us to today’s verdict.

Posted: June 18, 2009

Sample Sizes (and Minnesota Juries)

Last week we got a chance to listen to one of these groups outside the usual circumstances. It wasn’t a research project, and it wasn’t by sitting behind a two-way mirror. This group of 12 industry outsiders likely hadn’t engaged in debates about long-tail sales theories, the effectiveness of DRM schemes, or consumption patterns of digital media when marginal costs approach zero. Which isn’t to say they were disengaged – most of them had mp3 players, and at least some knew what peer-to-peer software was. But overall, they were probably a good cross section of ‘real world’ music listeners.

Posted: June 23, 2009

Anyone surprised?