So, the RIAA is offering an "amnesty" (note the scare quotes) to people who are currently sharing copyrighted materials. No, I'm not linking to it because if I did there's a chance one of my loyal readers might actually go and apply for it. That would be a bad thing. You see, it's a negative sum game. The amnesty is not available for people who are currently being sued and all you really have to do to avoid being sued is stop sharing (which you must do anyway to qualify for the amnesty). The EFF has some other recommendations on how not to get sued.

Applying for this RIAA amnesty will only identify you as a copyright violator, there is no guarantee that the RIAA will keep that fact to themselves and the RIAA is not the only group out there pursuing action against copyright infringers. If you were one of these other groups, wouldn't you pay some cashola for a list of confirmed and admitted copyright violators?

Some folk are a bit vocal (and humorous) about how you would be screwed by applying for the amnesty.

I don't share or download tunes. Not that I'd feel particularly bad about it, music just isn't that big for me. I used to be way into music and I have a massive CD collection but I haven't added to it in about 10 years. I got pissed because it would cost close to $20 to get the one song I wanted, along with 19 crapful songs, so I just stopped buying new. I then got into the BMG thing where you get 12 for 1 and did that for a couple years, cancelling my membership each time I met my obligation and then joining again for the big special when i wanted some CDs. That got old as their selections never really changed and I pretty much had everything they offered. I started buying used but that didn't last long either as the CDs I wanted to purchase generally weren't there. Eventually I just stopped buying music, period.

Over a couple years my music fetish atrophied and died. By the time file sharing came out I was just over it. I played with Napster a bit but even that was more effort than I was willing to put into what was once my favorite hobby. Too many downloads aborted, too many bad files. As far as the whole file sharing shebang goes, Randy Nieland sums it up nicely: