The Register: 'Kick me again, RIAA. Please! Nesson: the biggest legal fail in history?'

I don't agree with everything Andrew Orlowski writes. But he never bores me:

Nesson has achieved something I thought was completely impossible in 2009, and that's to allow the US recording industry's lobby group to paint itself in a sympathetic light. No longer must the RIAA explain why their biggest members are not using technology to make money for the people they represent. The Boston case allowed the four major labels to justify an enforcement policy against opponents who appeared compulsively dishonest, irrational, paranoid, and with an abnormal sense of entitlement.

Nice work, Charlie.

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Nesson's case was a misanthropic bundle of intellectual prejudices, a worker's paradise in which everyone has rights, except creative people. In his Kumbaya world, we'd all be better off, except the people who actually do the art. But once the jury had heard from Tenenbaum - a deeply unpleasant defendant - the die was cast.

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Why was anyone there? Well, just as a power station has an endless need for fuel, the anti-copyright gaggle has an insatiable need for victims. Injustice burns deep, and is triggered by the merest hint that "The Man" might be tampering with one's "bits".

Definitely read the whole thing.