As legendary bogeymen go, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has been vying for the number one spot. They are the villain of every Slashdot and Boing Boing fan, the bane of college students and soccer moms, the cloaked henchmen hiding in the bushes to pounce on unsuspecting net surfers everywhere. If you listen to music, if you own a single music file, the RIAA thinks you digitally ripped it off. You are automatically guilty until proven innocent.

Recall the “Spanish Inquisition” sketch (ask your nearest Monty Python fan). The RIAA’s chief weapon is, indeed, fear and surprise… and a ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion… I’ll come in again.

“When they come after you with dogs, instead of running away, get a bigger dog.” - lately the news has been full of stories of people who stood up to the RIAA, and the RIAA has been surprisingly fast to back down. Really, there’s no method at all to their madness; their pursuit of the public seems to be driven by picking names at random out of the phone book. They’ve gone after people who don’t even own a computer, people who have been dead for years, grandmas and young children, and probably next even family pets!

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is your friend. This page lists some handy methods at the bottom for legal defense. The things to remember are: evidence and intent.

“Evidence” is already virtually nonexistent in most cases. You can further restrict the likelihood of finding false “evidence” by keeping your file system clean, re-naming anything that *sounds* like a music file, removing old search entries and browser history, using proxy services whenever possible, and publicly denying that you own a computer.

“Intent” is a good fallback. Somebody used your computer without your knowledge. You were hacked. Your ISP didn’t tell you what you were doing. You clicked a link that was emailed to you. You accidentally downloaded something you thought was a program. You were researching a homework assignment. The cat jumped on your keyboard. A virus did it. And so on. These are all more plausible than the claims of the RIAA so far. Remember, victory in court goes to the person who is at least one degree saner than their opponent.

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