That's gotta hurt...

More proof that when you poke a caged tiger, you're liable to get your hand bitten off:

In the first U.S. case of its kind, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday rejected Cecilia Gonzalez' arguments that she was merely "sampling" downloaded music to see which CDs she might want to purchase--and that her sampling was protected under copyright law's "fair use" exception.

Well when they found her hard drive they found well over one thousand songs on it that she claimed were from CDs that she owned. Now, as someone who happens to have over on thousand songs on his hard drive, I call bullshit on that. If you look at my CD rack and compare it with my iTunes collection, you won't find any difference between them. And why the hell do you need to use a file sharing network for songs from CDs that you actually own? You could quite easily download iTunes or MusicMatch and rip them to your hard drive and save yourself the trouble. If you actually own the CDs, then you really don't need to be using a file sharing network to get the songs you already have access to, don't you?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco digital-rights group, has published a list of suggestions on how not to get sued by the RIAA.

Here's the quick summary: don't share songs you don't have the publication rights to. Go out and record your own music if you want to give it away for free, but don't go whining about "fair use" when it comes to getting busted for downloading songs you didn't buy. If your copy of the album was smashed to pieces, that would be one thing, but sampling is not in fact a fair use right. Sorry, but if we are going to protect the concept of fair use, it must be distinguished from the blatant free-loading of individuals like this one.