Posted on September 13, 2003

Science/Technology

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) recently filed copyright infringement lawsuits against 261 people who have downloaded and traded music over the Internet while offering amnesty to the estimated sixty million other music lovers who have shared music online. Public Knowledge, a public-interest group that advocates a fair and balanced approach to copyright and technology policy, has come out in support of the RIAA program, as long as it is accompanied by an industry plan that would enable music lovers to purchase and share — to a reasonable degree — individual songs online. To that end, the group has posted a list of five things that every file trader should know about the RIAA's Clean Slate Program (2 pages, PDF) and cautions file traders to carefully consider the conditions offered by RIAA before signing on the dotted line.