Sing along with me now: 'Hands in my picket/Hands in my pocket...'.

What was I rambling about? Oh yes: The Mafiaa wants you to pay every time you share or copy media on your local network.

Move that media file? Pay a fee.
Defragment your hard drive? Pay a fee.
Watch that video? Pay a fee.
Watch that video with a friend in the room? Pay another fee.

Where will it end?

As if anyone had any doubts, the RIAA has changed their business model from 'producing new music that people will buy' to 'sending threatening letters to poor college students'.

This article On the consumerist has the details of a student who settled through the formerly p2p-ad-laden site p2plawsuits.com (intentionally not linked).

A recent blog post I read concerned the concept of intellectual property and pointed out that the very concept of property is an intellectual construct. This got me thinking about how the music industry is always crying poor about people 'stealing' music. I find it no surprise that they are the ones crying the loudest about it, and they are the ones who reap (or perhaps we should say 'rape'...) the most profits from it. If artists truly were being harmed (as the music industry claims), wouldn't the artists themselves be up in arms?

So the MPAA thinks can convince parents to use a new software program to 'monitor their children's machines' for 'illegal content'. Note that this program bases its judgements on file extensions, so all those wavs and mp3's found in your program directories and games folders will be wiped as well as all of the windows media files.