[MplsTaper]

Hah, how about a MTV news article from January 1998

RIAA TARGETS NET TAPE TRADERS IN ONGOING WAR
INDUSTRY STRONG-ARMING OF THOSE DEALING LIVE RECORDINGS VIA WEB HAS SCARED MANY INTO SUBMISSION.

Dave Assllin, 27, of Boston said explicitly on his concert tape website that he doesn't trade in any fashion, be it concert-for-concert, two-for-one or for money. Privately, however, he explained that in four years he's built a collection of more than 400 unreleased Smashing Pumpkins audio and video tapes.

Although Assllin calls the recent action by the RIAA "silly chest-puffing," he said he has witnessed its effects. "I can't even tell you how many people they've scared into hiding their lists or pulling them off the Web, which is exactly what they want to do. Fifteen or 20 people that I trade with have pulled their pages off or changed the location."

The RIAA is more interested in halting transactions where money is exchanged for recordings than traditional concert-for-concert trades, Creighton said.

"We do look into those situations. Typically in those situations what we like to do is talk to our member companies about it, as well as the artists themselves, to get a flavor for how concerned they are about those situations," he said. "In some cases, we might send a warning letter as opposed to a strongly worded cease and desist letter. But don't let that confuse anybody -- the trading of the tapes would be considered technically illegal."

Although McLean said he has no intention of stopping his own trades, he predicted that the RIAA warning will have a chilling effect that will be felt most by newcomers looking to get into tape-trading. "I already have the friends who I know and I've traded with before," he said. "The main effect is that people are not going to be as willing to trade with newbies." But in Assllin's view, the RIAA is grasping at straws. He called their tactics "irrelevant" in the grassroots territory of cyberspace. "The Internet changes the rules," he said. "They can't go out and bust a distributor and cut off the supply of [bootleg] CDs or LPs to a large part of the world. So they're trying to scare people into not trading this way. But this is just temporary. People will forget all about this." [Wed., Jan. 14, 1998, 9 a.m. PST]