… come at this very strong blog, Copyrights and Campaigns, the work of DC lawyer Ben Sheffner. He does a quick recap of how the retreat was first reported and covered since. Nothing really earth-shattering, just, you know, the facts.

He also writes lucidly and candidly on an ongoing Patterico brouhaha and the Jammie Thomas case—that’s the one where the RIAA took a file-sharer to rial and got a judgment.

Most amusingly Sheffner, who is apparently a Republican, is a strong supporter of the RIAA’s file sharing suit, for all sorts of reasons, some of which are detailed here.

He’s wrong about this*, but it doesn’t take away from the substance of his blog. He seems to be pretty intellectually honest.

* For the record, the RIAA’s suits are ineffective; file-sharing has grown immensely since their inception. They are a distraction; the industry should have been harnessing the new technology, not fighting against it. It’s a PR nightmare; it is much easier now to root for the industry’s downfall, whereas it has deserved that fate for many years, for reasons I’ll detail in the next paragraph, and never managed to engender such hostility. And finally it’s harmful to the tiny tiny percentage of users who are getting ensnared in this, the low-hanging fruit of the most unsophisticated file-sharers who don’t know how to minimize their risk in various ways. These people are like the kids who are rotting in Texas jails for minor marijuana infractions.

Why does the industry deserve to be dismantled? Because it has been paying radio stations to pay its music, and it has never paid artists their royalties, and has used its power to make it difficult to hold it to account.  The indignance we hear about file-sharing, a minor offence, has never been demonstrated about the Great Royalties Ripoff, which is a massive industrywide fraud.