By fnord12 | January 10, 2006, 12:35 PM | Liberal Outrage & My stupid life | Link

The Abuse Team is here to help

We got an email from our hosting service's Abuse Team, threatening to beat us with sticks if we didn't remove all the mp3s from our site. When i explained that these were in fact our mp3s, the Abuse Coordinator wrote back saying sorry, it was just their automated bots getting a little too ambitious. But think about that for a second. The record industry has these hosting providers so scared that they've got them monitoring and harassing their own customers in the RIAA's interests. We pay our providers, so they are supposed to be looking out for our interests, not the record companies'. I guess that sounds a lot like telling a cop "i pay your salary", but really, it's one thing to respond to a complaint. It's another to have our sites monitored for unacceptable file formats.

The record industry needs to give up. First of all, we've been swapping music since the invention of cassette tapes, which is when they first started claiming the industry would collapse if it didn't stop. (I still have my Dead Kennedys In God We Trust, Inc. EP. "The record industry says home taping is killing the music business. We left side B blank so you can help.") But if they really want to do something about it, how about lowering prices, putting out a lot less crap, and paying your artists more? I'm a lot more likely to care about ripping off a struggling artist than i am Sony Records.