Imagine this, your twelve year-old daughter – or sister – downloads a few songs on file sharing program Kazaa and a week later you find a subpoena in your mailbox. Sound highly unlikely? Well, its not. Because as of September 9th, 2003, the recording industry has filed 261 lawsuits against file sharers with the promise of more to come.

You read right. File sharers.

Gone are the days of large, public, media-crazed lawsuits filed against the companies that manage the file-swapping programs (like the Napster suit); now, it’s your neck that is on the line.

But this is with justified cause according the record industry. After all, it is OUR (the consumer’s) fault that record sales have slumped to an all-time decade low. The recording industry is not to blame at all…. no, they have done nothing to stunt their sales at all. Because offering consumers limited choices of music after conspiring to regulate the prices of CD’s (making the prices of CD’s so high that college students had to spare themselves textbooks in order to have some music in their lives) is smart business practice. Practices such as these do not cause consumer backlash at all…

Well, actually NO – they do – and quite a lot of it. This is one of the main reasons why so many people have abandoned the now beleaguered recording industry in favor of free music online. And with justified cause too! The record companies have insulted our intelligence, robbed us blind, and now they’re crying broke as they drag us to court.

Last time I checked it was not a good customer relation’s policy to take your clientele to court. In fact, I think it pisses them off and leads to even more consumer backlash; which is one of the predicaments that brought the recording industry to its current position in the first place.

The main issue with the industry is that, instead of going with the flow of technology, and trying to adapt, the recording industry is fighting the times and their consumers in the process. Like the movie industry after the advent of the VCR, the recording industry is trying to select our tastes for us, consequently stunting technological growth in the process. The mass migration of users from the defunct Napster to other file sharing programs should have indicated to the industry that file sharing over the Internet would not stop. With the availabilty of high-speed Internet, file sharing has become less of a practice, and more of a way of life. Alas, the industry strikes back, and this time, they are setting out to make bigger asses out of themselves then before.

Aside from suing twelve-year-olds, (which everyone can agree is almost as bad as bullying little kids out of their lunch money) they have insulted and underestimated our intelligence again. Not only will we, as consumers and savvy Internet users, continue to share files, but we will be forced to use new programs that protect user identity and IP addresses (an individualized computer identification number that all computers leak out while using the internet). Such programs are already in development (unofficially, of course), but are set to make their release to a public whose contempt for the record industry has reached an all-time decade high.

The record industry claims to have made attempts to lure consumers into pay-to-download sites like Apple’s iTunes, but they’ve made one of the same mistakes that sent consumers running almost a half decade ago – limited content. Consumers want options, which the recording industry is not willing to give us yet. They want to force content down our throats in an attempt to force us to buy their pre-selected products. We want talent, we want quality and we want diversity.

The bottom line is that I’m not going to stop downloading, and neither will anyone else I know, because it’s free, it’s easy and it grants access to everything these pay-to-download services don’t. Internet downloading offers unlimited content and diversity, and stabs at the heart of the recording industry. To the recording executives: take this back to your conference tables and come up with a more innovative solution to your woes than suing elementary school students.