Despite the fact the RIAA has lost important legal ground recently in its intimidation campaign, aptly spun as one to 'protect illegal sharing" among other things, it has turned to trying to mislead the public by starting at universities, likely for two reasons: for one, universities have often been tied to massive file-sharing and downloading by students; the other hopes they can 'mold" the student population to think their way under the guise of an 'educational" video:
There's no real need to spell out the RIAA's agenda in this venture, although it is curious that when the RIAA says 'it's always illegal to…copy…a song," which should alert careful readers to the 'always" fallacy: it is fine if it is always true, but there are obvious contradictions with copyright law, one of which being for scholarly use and the other for personal backups. If it were always illegal to copy something, then one couldn't back up the CD one owns'”and if the CD failed to play, that would be too bad. That shoots down the 'always" assertion in flames! Once again, the RIAA never concedes that downloading and hearing a song beforehand usually increases sales of a single or album, rather than hurts it. The RIAA aims to paint everything with the same large brush, avoiding to explain the exceptions such as the ones above. If the RIAA truly desires 'critical thinking" to occur, why not tell the truth and disclose the facts? Of course, given the recent Oklahoma case the RIAA dropped (and even asked the judge to not read the brief), we can fairly assume the RIAA is not interested in the facts of the case, but only trying to shape people's attitudes to the RIAA's way of thinking.
Source: C|net
