p2pnet.net news:- The members of the Big 4 Organized Music cartel have announced the cessation of the sue ‘em all marketing campaign under which they’ve been trying to persuade consumers to buy corporate download product.

“We have issued instructions to the RIAA and to our other enforcement organizations around the world to immediately withdraw, without prejudice, all lawsuits and to refund court costs and other expenses incurred by people sued,” says Phil McBoot, chairman of the Big 4 Working Group, in a statement, going on:

“We have also terminated Mitch Bainwol, Carry Sherman, Jonathan Lamy and Jenny Engebretsen.

“We were acting on their advice, which we now realise was wrong. We humbly and sincerely apologise to anyone who may have inadvertently been harmed by the actions of the RIAA, BPI, IFPI and similar bodies.”

McBoot says the Big 4 will be disbanding all existing trade organizations and founding a single new organisation to be called Friends of the Labels which will work with p2p developers and independent artists to formulate ‘fair use’ practices and policies, and creative pricing and distribution structures.

‘We meant no harm’

“We honestly didn’t mean anyone any harm,” says former RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) boss Mitch Bainwol in a separate statement issued today.

“We were only following instructions from Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG. They said they and their employees have been suffering terrible financial and personal hardships because of all the p2p file sharing that’s been going on, and we believed them.”

Says ex-RIAA second-in-command Cary Sherman, “We have been trying to educate people into adopting the correct procedure for acquiring music online, in acccordance with standing instructions from our employers.”

Bainwol and Sherman are moving to the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) as special advisers to MPAA chairman Dan Glickman.

Slashdot it!

If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the end (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 12:29 pm and is filed under RIAA News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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