We all know that the RIAA likes to think its strategy of suing its best customers is about "educating" people, but you would think that by now the press would know better than to simply reprint RIAA propaganda. Unfortunately, that's not the case. The latest AP article (that's getting picked up in a variety of places) about the threat letters to college students
basically reprints a lot of RIAA propaganda as fact, misstates what the letters are actually about and doesn't bother to get a quote from anyone who questions the RIAA's legal standing or business rationale for these letters. Instead, it's a scare story that the RIAA will use to show universities that their students better pay up. The article is full of stories about students who can barely afford to pay, but who feel compelled to pay the RIAA $3,000 without ever getting a chance to defend themselves. The article never once notes that the students often have pretty strong legal defenses, and Universities have no requirement to pass on the threats until an actual lawsuit is filed. Meanwhile, it falsely states that the lawsuit threats are for "downloading" when they're actually for sharing or uploading. You would think that, with the RIAA having so many cases
shot down these days, while various universities are
fighting back against the bogus RIAA threats, that an AP reporter would at least mention some of these issues, rather than accepting the RIAA spin as fact.
