“LOS ANGELES-The Recording Industry Association of America announced Tuesday that it will be taking legal action against anyone discovered telling friends, acquaintances, or associates about new songs, artists, or albums. “We are merely exercising our right to defend our intellectual properties from unauthorized peer-to-peer notification of the existence of copyrighted material,” a press release signed by RIAA anti-piracy director Brad Buckles read. “We will aggressively prosecute those individuals who attempt to pirate our property by generating ‘buzz’ about any proprietary music, movies, or software, or enjoy same in the company of anyone other than themselves.” RIAA attorneys said they were also looking into the legality of word-of- mouth “favorites-sharing” sites, such as coffee shops, universities, and living rooms.”
Okay, granted, it comes from The Onion, which occasionally prints a few things that are not entirely true in some hyper-technical sense. But is this item any more unlikely than the news that Sony had intentionally installed a virus on your computer when you played a CD?
By the way, Business Week just reported that Sony had been pressuring security vendor F-Secure for a month to stay quiet about the security hole caused by its rootkit, before an independent researcher discovered it himself. The real world makes The Onion look tame sometimes.
