Yeah, I don’t see how this helps the RIAA at all:

Despite more than 20,000 lawsuits filed against music fans in the years since they started finding free tunes online rather than buying CDs from record companies, the recording industry has utterly failed to halt the decline of the record album or the rise of digital music sharing.

Still, hardly a month goes by without a news release from the industry’s lobby, the Recording Industry Association of America, touting a new wave of letters to college students and others demanding a settlement payment and threatening a legal battle.

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

I try to be a good soldier in the fight against piracy, a staunch IP lawyer trooper, but there are limits. What do they hope to gain with this litigation? And what does stuff like this say to other countries that are being pressured by the U.S. to "get tough" on IP infringement?

If I was an official in the Chinese government, I might look at the RIAA litigation strategy and say to myself that if that’s what it takes to be "tough on infringement," then it simply isn’t worth it.

I also can’t imagine that the music industry really thinks that this is good for their business. DRM has been an absolute disaster, and the content people keep moving further and further away from what the hardware/software can do and what consumers demand. What a fiasco.