What's the Opposite of a Silver Lining?

Wired just posted an article about Obama's appointment of a number of RIAA lawyers to the justice department. The headline alone made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention.

Here's my problem. The RIAA stands for a lot of the stuff that I can't stand. I'm not even talking about going after music downloaders. That's an unsavory tactic, but I can at least understand why they're doing it. What really bothers me about the RIAA is the hypocrisy and the lack of humanity.

The point of the organization is to protect the profitability and business model of the recording industry. With that purpose, they are lying when they say they represent the artists. They represent the businesses that exploit the artists. The intellectual property is what they're really interested in protecting, and I guess I don't have a problem with that actual part of it. The artist would have had to enter into a contract with a major label for the RIAA to be protecting the IP the artist originally created.

It's a tangled mess, and it's exactly why Prince became "the artist formerly known as" in a protest against the dehumanization of his art. Hard to feel sorry for a guy that made so much money, though, but he probably calculated how much he would have made without the label behind him, and it probably made him angry. The catch-22 is that he might not have made all that money without the saturation the major label was able to provide.

Anyhow, I've veered from my point, which is that the headline of that Wired article sent a chill up my spine, but on second thought, lawyers are lawyers. Will they work tirelessly to open peer to peer networks and make all music free to trade? Likely not. Will they double up their effort to take down the biggest music downloaders? Doubtful, as that directive likely didn't come from the lawyers themselves.

My hope is that Obama is picking these lawyers because they are good at what they do and have bigger fish to fry than an MP3 downloading housewife in Duluth. On the bright side, they won't be working for the RIAA anymore, either.