*click*snick-snick*BANG!

[curvemudgeon]

If the RIAA were a person, would they be able to aim a gun accurately enough to shoot off their own toes?

From this Billboard article discussing the viral marketing surrounding NIN's new release 'Year Zero',

According to one post, a male fan, allegedly by happenstance, found a USB drive in a bathroom stall during a NIN concert at the Coliseum in Lisbon, Portugal. This flash drive (yes, Reznor's idea) contained an MP3 of album track "My Violent Heart. Additional USB drives were purportedly found in Barcelona and Manchester, England. they included MP3s of album tracks "Me, I'm Not" and "In This Twilight," respectively.

Excited fans then began swapping and sharing these music files online. Another Web posting alleged that all this activity resulted in entertainment blog Idolator and other sites receiving e-mail from the Recording Industry Association of America, demanding that they remove the MP3s from their sites. An RIAA representative confirms this, a move that boggles the minds of many. "These f*cking idiots are going after a campaign that the label signed off on," the source says.

Comments

[ivy]

Oh man, thats idiotic. (Also, working in security, I'm not putting some random USB drive into a system that I care about! That's totally asking for an exploit! But I recognize that 99.9% of the population either doesn't know that, doesn't care, or deems it so unlikely as to be trivial risk.)

[curvemudgeon.livejournal.com]

But but but...it was signed off on by a MAJOR RECORD LABEL!1!1eleventy!!1! No MAJOR RECORD LABEL would EVER be caught dead distributing something that might put people's systems at risk!!!one!sies!11!!

Oops, look at the time, gotta run! Can't miss my proctologist appointment so I can get the latest update for my 'Sony "My First Polyp"'(tm)

[arensb.livejournal.com]

It's not stupidity: it's meta-viral marketing: the RIAA C&D is creating publicity even among people who wouldn't have normally downloaded one of the "found" MP3s.

[curvemudgeon.livejournal.com]

Did you ever take a gander at testimony reports of the RIAA's "expert" witnesses? It's stupidity.