It's so obvious that the RIAA are just pissed that they completly missed the whole music download boat. So what do they do ? Bring out their own, cripiled 'download' services that are completly useless compared to (say) Kazaa or Gnucleus. And then, when no one uses their systems, they lobby the govt. to produce a law that is wrong (want to read a book in a library ? Fine, but you can't buy it and then read it at work. And you can only own 5 books at a time.).
What they need to do instead is produce a service that provides high quality, unlimited use (>190bps MP3/Ogg would be good) music tracks of their whole catalog for a small per-track fee (50p ?). I'd pay that. But unless they offer a service better than the free systems they can't control [2], no one will pay.
Common sense, innit ? Someone should tell them.
Land of the free ? Nope.
Home of the brave ? Yup.
[1] Don't be silly. Never happen. Hasn't happened in the post Sept. 11th era at all. Nope. Never. USA good. Must follow. Baaaa.
Update 2 May :Look - an EU version !
[2] Napster may be gone, long live really decentralized systems like Gnucleus.