That money should/could have gone to the artists. The RIAA exist to make themselves and other lawyers rich, not to help artists.

Yet more science fiction made real. This year has been awesome for that so far.

Thread on reddit - good advice in comments

Unexpectedly excellent article from an american cop on their rights to privacy while on the job, or more accurately, their lack of privacy rights, as they are public servants.

If the public can’t video cops on the job, then they are not public police, they’re secret police, and we know where that road ends up.

Anyway, technology will make it trivial to stream video direct to the internet from a microscopic hidden camera for a tiny price very soon. A small hole cut in a top pocket and an iphone would do the trick already. Advances in memory capacity and new functionality like retrospective recording systems (that keep all audio and video buffered wether you’re recording or not) will soon lead to systems that just record everything, and instead of the recording button starting the recorder, it simply drops a marker into the 24/7 stream to say “this bit is interesting”.

Everyone will have these systems once they are trivially cheap.

That will be unpolicable, so they had better get used to it, the same way that millions of British folk got used to 24/7 CCTV surveillance once CCTV cameras and videotape become trivially cheap to governments and companies.