RIAA and trials for online music sharing

I was talking to a friend of mine a couple of days ago how we thought the world (well, at least the western world) had reached a peak of freedom maybe a decade or so ago and that now everything is going down the drain. The Patriot Act and the DMCA (not to mention Bush's reelection) have literally made me not want to live in the US for as long as I can foresee. Software patents (hell, patents in general) already spread to Europe. In Germany it's now against the law to host or write any program that could possibly be used to hack another computer (yeah, that's right, anything that could possibly be used, how the hell are you supposed to define that?? How the hell are you supposed to be a network security engineer when all the programs you use on a daily basis (to defend from attacks) have suddenly become illegal?!?!). And now, the RIAA won their first trial case against mrs. Thomas.
Let me paint you a picture: Jammie Thomas, a middle-age mom, was accused by the RIAA of sharing music files back in early 2005 through KaZaA (everybody remembers that spyware-infested program, don't you?). She is an avid music fan. She owns literally hundreds of CD's and DVD's. No real evidence of her distributing any of the music was presented; she was found guilty on ground that making the songs available was already copyright infringement. The "evidence" presented against her were a username that coincided with her e-mail address, the IP address used to share the files (which, as anyone that knows anything about how the Internet works knows could be forged and is by no means evidence of identity; heck, if it were why the hell would we need half of the cryptographic protocols we study?!?!? I'd go back to Salvador and sell coconuts at the beach....). By the end of the trial she was ordered to pay US$9.250,00 per song (out of a possible US$150.000,00, so one might say that she actually got lucky)!! She was charged with sharing 24 individual songs, so that amounts to US$220.000,00.
It's easy to have sympathy for her, right?! After all she's a mom, a formerly good customer who spent thousands of dollars on products by the same guys who sued her; she was convicted for sharing 24 songs... how many "illegal" songs have you listened to in the last few years?? Downloaded, shared?? She is supposed to pay US$220.000,00 in damages, it'd probably take hr quite a few years to even see that kind of money, let alone being able to pay it up. But take all that sentimental bullshit aside: if it were a single 25-year-old millionaire who got sued for
the exact same crime, it would still be very wrong to get this outcome.
I know customers don't usually care about the practices of the companies whose product they buy. Later on, they bitch and complain when they see something unfair: "Oh My God, how could they do that?? Sue a mother for US$220.000,00 because she shared 20 something songs..." They could and did because it's cheap for them and it's a win-win situation: at the very least they scared a whole lot of people from sharing music on the web. And what if they lost?? So what, lawyers come cheap to giant industry conglomerates, they are expensive for us, who have to defend ourselves. So, what I'd like to see happening is a boycott on music sold by members of the RIAA. Music in the US nowadays is mostly shit anyways, but they still have some good stuff on their catalogs; don't buy it. Buy independent music that is just as good (or even better). Put your money to good use and try to stand up for something: not the legality or morality of sharing music, but the immorality of their scare-tactics.

• More information on the case here, here and here.
• List of Record Labels members of the RIAA.