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RIAA wins the “Worst Company in America 2007”. The RIAA is mainly EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner.

How to hurt the RIAA. … I think its high time that the RIAA is not referenced by its name but rather by its members. Imagine how much it would hurt someone like Sony if each time a bad article, comment or story reached the masses it had the words representing Sony in the title. Enough of that would force a brand to leave the RIAA group because it was too damaging to their brand name. ...

Hilarious post on how to stop filesharers from stealing hotel bandwidth. So, I’m in Milwaukee at ye olde Holiday Inn Express. They have a wireless internet connection here and it’s been suckin’ all night, like I couldn’t even do anything on it. I suspected someone running a p2p program and taking up all of the bandwidth, so I fired up ntop to analyze the type of traffic on the network, and just who it was generating it. Lo and behold, someone was running a p2p app, and taking up 1.6Mbit worth of bandwidth. That’s just not fair to the 20 other people on the network, so I decided to boot him from the network. I tried poisoning his arp cache and the default gateway’s cache, but that only works on some wireless access points, apparently not this one. I can’t send an 802.11 deauth message from my OS X box, because the card doesn’t support raw packet injection, so what to do??? I notice that his IP in the ntop interface changed into a name. His windows machine was spewing Netbios packets with his computer name in it. For the sake of his privacy, I’ve changed the name, but let’s say it was “smith-laptop”. So I pick up my cellphone and call the front desk at the hotel and as for Mr. Smith’s room. The lady at the front desk says “Eric Smith?” And I tell her yes. The phone rings, someone picks up, the conversation goes like this: Me: Eric Smith? Eric: Uhh, yeah? Me: My name is Jim Grant, and I’m an investigator with the RIAA. Have you heard of us? Eric: Uhhhhh….. What does that stand for? Me: Recording Industry Association of America. We represent several large record companies. In monitoring several p2p filesharing networks, we have found that you Eric, are currently downloading copyrighted material. Are you aware that this is illegal? Eric: Ummm…. my laptop is off. (At this point, I no longer see him on the network) Me: We are in the process of filing 18182 lawsuits against people who steal copyrighted music on the internet. We will continue monitoring these networks, and if we see you on them again, you will hear back from us. Eric: Ok, thanks. Bye. So, now my network is nice and speedy again. And some guy is in his room trying to dry out his underwear. :) I should have recorded the call since my cellphone has the capability to record conversations. The above conversation can’t even begin to show the fear in his voice. I’m sure he’s scared as hell wondering how they found out his name and that he was staying at a hotel and exactly what room he was in. ...

However, Apple doesn’t make money on iTunes. It goes to the RIAA and credit card companies. Update: 24 Apr 2007 – Looks like Apple is making money on iTunes after all. They’ve renegotiated agreements, especially with credit card companies, and make as much as 10 cents per song. Comments drew 15 Feb 2011 2:08 am: it obviously does its a company from what revenue they get get say 1.5 B they would give alot to companies (who then takes some and gives it to the artists) and they’re left with around 500 M and then thats what they earn

Neat prank on the RIAA. Intruiging, though, about their contact address being hard to find. So I tried the same, by Googling RIAA First hit: www.riaa.org/index.cfm -> The Page Cannot Be Found Second hit: www.riaa.org. No contact info on 1st page. Tried “About us”. No luck. Searching for “contact” on the site gave 704 useless pages. Google search for “contact” in www.riaa.org gives www.riaa.org/contact.cfm -> The page cannot be found I give up. But this guy John Hargrave is good.

Music-swapping continues. An RIAA spokesman says, The problem would have been far worse if we had not stopped Napster. We would have seen far more venture capital companies taking a shot (at P2P sites) if Napster had succeeded. However, consumers are continually becoming more accustomed to downloading music for free KaZaa’s the most popular right now, but not for long, perhaps. KaZaa also faces a possible Napster-esque end. The recording industry has sued the service and court date looms in December ...

RIAA sues radio stations for playing their music. (No, not really. It’s a spoof. But I wouldn’t be surprised.) via Scripting News

More e-mail being used as evidence. This time, by the evil RIAA against Morpheus and Kazaa. I wonder if this goes against some legal principle? Aren’t you supposed to say, “Anything you say can be used against you?” Reminds me of ‘American Beauty’, in which Ricky agrees to kills Jane’s parents on video.

I like this. Information Wave, an ISP, has banned RIAA from accessing their network. But, they will take their own measures to ensure copyright violation doesn’t happen. That’s solid.

Shame on the RIAA! Now they’re trying DoS attacks on Gnutella, etc. Can’t they realise the world has changed?