Think the Recording Industry Association of America is out to get you? Think again. Just when you thought the folks seeking to bankrupt you over the contents of your iPod were full-blooded enemies, they’ve thoughtfully made settling your RIAA lawsuit as simple as stealing a song with Limewire paying for a song on iTunes.
The very forces crusading against the immorality of illegal file sharing want you to think long and hard about your actions as you and your Mastercard, Visa or Discover Card click your way to RIAA debt freedom at p2plawsuits.com. Strapped for cash? No problem! Just as John Basedow will let you pay for his Fitness Made Simple program in three easy installments, the RIAA lets you create your own payment schedule.
Sure, we’re become accustomed to online banking and credit card payments, but with this new frontier of lawsuit settling the RIAA has paved the way for a new Internet marketing niche. Guilty Catholics seeking confession? The forgiveness of a priest could be just one click and one, possibly two, Visa payments away.
The next get rich quick scheme won’t involve lottery tickets and empty promises to religious authorities. It won’t require a Ph.D., venture capitalists, an army of programmers, consulting Steve Jobs, or mortgaging your house. Rather, this half-baked “business plan” relies on a recipe as simple as Easy Mac’s: an e-mail account, a paragraph of text and access to a PayPal-like method of payment. If people are willing to settle with the RIAA online, great money-making potential lies in the RIAA (that is, say, Recorded Indie Artists of America) e-mailing P2P offenders with a monetary sum of fines and offering easy payment plans on a clone-like site such as p2plawsuitspaid.com.
Hell, if the RIAA continues to bully music lovers to the tune of millions of dollars in lawsuit revenue annually, eye-for-an-eye retribution (albeit amoral) lends merit to fellow nefarious individuals and organizations capitalizing on the RIAA’s “no hassle” route to settling RIAA lawsuits.
I’m not a scammer. In fact, I think scamming spammers have the moral compass of a Bin Laden- Lucifer offspring. That said, the focus of this post is not to fuel the spamming world with blueprints for a new scheme, but rather to call attention to the absurdity of an institution’s use of a Web site that makes settling a supposed bona fide lawsuit as frivolous as paying for a year’s worth of floss on eBay.
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They’re so considerate!
Kahl Yung