Our friends at the RIAA seem hell-bent on ramming their worldview down every customer, former customer, or potential customer's throat. I see this as a problem from a marketing, customer service and legal standpoint since their methods infringe upon the privacy and civil liberties of everyone who uses the Internet, now more than half the country.

Some of the techniques the RIAA is using to thwart "piracy" over the Internet came out yesterday in court papers:

The disclosures were included in court papers filed against a Brooklyn woman fighting efforts to identify her for allegedly sharing nearly 1,000 songs over the Internet. The recording industry disputed her defense that songs on her family's computer were from compact discs she had legally purchased.

....Comparing the Brooklyn woman to a shoplifter, the RIAA told U.S. Magistrate John M. Facciola that she was "not an innocent or accidental infringer" and described her lawyer's claims otherwise as "shockingly misleading." The RIAA papers were filed in Washington overnight Tuesday and made available by the court Wednesday.

The woman's lawyer, Daniel N. Ballard of Sacramento, Calif., said the music industry's latest argument was "merely a smokescreen to divert attention" from the related issue of whether her Internet provider, Verizon Internet Services Inc., must turn over her identity under a copyright subpoena.

"You cannot bypass people's constitutional rights to privacy, due process and anonymous association to identify an alleged infringer," Ballard said.

Ballard has asked the court to delay any ruling for two weeks while he prepares detailed arguments, and he noted that his client - identified only as "nycfashiongirl" - has already removed the file-sharing software from her family's computer.

....The RIAA's latest court papers describe in unprecedented detail some sophisticated forensic techniques used by its investigators. These disclosures were even more detailed than answers the RIAA provided weeks ago at the request of Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., who has promised hearings into the industry's use of copyright subpoenas to track downloaders.

For example, the industry disclosed its use of a library of digital fingerprints, called "hashes," that it said can uniquely identify MP3 music files that had been traded on the Napster service as far back as May 2000. Examining hashes is commonly used by the FBI and other computer investigators in hacker cases.

By comparing the fingerprints of music files on a person's computer against its library, the RIAA believes it can determine in some cases whether someone recorded a song from a legally purchased CD or downloaded it from someone else over the Internet.

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