Dinosaurs attack

Three dozen Virginia Tech students get "pre-litigation settlement letters" from the Recording Industry Association of America about alleged illegal music downloading, Rex Bowman reports in the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/news.apx.-content-articles-RTD-2008-01-23-0116.html

"Altogether 4,400 students at 158 U.S. campuses are facing demands to pay $3,000 to $5,000 for alleged piracy," reports the British columnist Norman Lebrecht.

Lebrecht recalls asking a record-label executive 10 years ago about how the industry would cope with music file-sharing. "The response was, 'We've put the lawyers onto it.' There was no B-plan. So set was the biz in its ways, so wedded to the [compact disc], that it did not recognise the download culture until too late."

http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/080123-NL-future.html

Meanwhile, Greg Kot writes in the Chicago Tribune, "the Songwriters Association of Canada is proposing a $5-a-month licensing fee on every wireless and Internet account in the country, in exchange for unlimited access to all recorded music."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/chi-0120_musicbiz_coverjan20,1,5854932.story?track=rss