Great links. I hope this becomes a huge movement that stops these huge corporations from destroying freedom!
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Every Music CDR since the AHRA was enacted has a hidden tax built into the price! (2% of the manufacturers sales) This is supposedly to pay the artists for home recording. Who Collects the Tax? The RIAA under the auspices of the AARC. Who shares office space with the RIAA and has many of the RIAA employees working for it. I haven't been able to find one artist that was paid a cent of the money. 4% is set aside for non-featured artists, of the remainder 40% for the featured artist and 60% for the labels. To date I have not found one artist who has received one cent of this money. (Source: RIAA website) In addition every CD recorder has a $2.00 surcharge built into the price that goes directly to the RIAA

The artists received not one cent of the money from the MP3.Com settlements of approx $158 Million to the labels. Who did??? The label themselves.

"SoundExchange" the new digital rights collective for collecting royalties from internet play is a division of the RIAA. They did not distribute royalties in July 2001 as they were supposed to do, but instead decided to wait until next year.

85% of all music is released by 5 major labels (Sony, EMI, UMG, Time Warner, & BMG)
Federal Trade Commission (FTC Statement)

At any given point about 20% of the music every recorded is available legally. The rest is locked away by the labels depriving the creators of a potential source of income, the fans of the music they want, while creating a false market for the band "d'jour."
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Now I say this, either stop taxing the CDR sales, or stop hounding users who download music.. this has got to stop..

You can't double dip your wick and expect the candle to burn forever...