Seriously. A $1.9 million fine for sharing 24 songs? Are these people for real?

Jammie Thomas-Rasset had her fine increased from $222,000 on a retrial, after the judge in the original case said he had erred in instructing the jury. And now the second trial has awarded this staggeringly ridiculous sum to the RIAA.

Thomas-Rasset had more than 1,700 songs in her shared folder, but the court case, apparently, picked a sample of 24. In among the offending tracks were the Goo Goo Dolls and Richard Marx. I’m not sure what’s worse – getting charged tens of thousands of dollars for a Richard Marx track or even having it in the first place.

Good luck getting the cash out of a 32-year-old with a few mouths to feed. Just what the RIAA needed too – more fantastic PR.

But the RIAA isn’t stopping there, and there are similar cases due in court in the US.

Every time I read about the record industry banging on about how downloading music is killing their industry, I could willingly poke my eyes out.

Simple fact #1: just because someone downloads a song for free, it doesn’t mean they’d buy it.

Simple fact #2: just because the music industry is losing sales, it doesn’t mean it’s down to file-sharing. Perhaps people are just fed up with a lot of the crap that’s masquerading as music these days. Or maybe, just maybe, they’re spending their money on something else. Just a thought.

Ben Goldacre does a pretty good job of ripping the industry’s figures apart here.