The point isn't whether those services are legal or not. The RIAA fails to accept the fact that the internet has made middlemen (gatekeepers) utterly obsolete. The internet doesn't "have the potential" to be a an efficient means of distributing digital data - it's the whole point of the net in the first place.
The RIAA wants the advantages of the net without having to deal with the consequences (namely, being obsolete), which is laughable, not to mention futile. I hope they'll be out of business soon so we can look back at their stupid whining in a few decades and heartily laugh at the faint memory of copyright while we freely access the shared knowledge, culture and information of mankind.
They remind me of AOL but at a bigger scale. They are trying to do everything they can to keep their ship from sinking. The fact that they seem like they could be successful is worrying.
When AOL started to shrink/die it started doing really shady things to keep users from switching internet providers [1]. One of the most insidious ones was how they would screw with a user's computer so that they would not be able to switch internet providers [2].
The fact that RIAA is trying to cripple the internet as a whole tells me that the beast is desperate and dying. It knows that its death is near and as a last bid for survival has gone for broke. If we can just keep it at bay for a few more years it will probably finally die.
The RIAA wants the advantages of the net without having to deal with the consequences (namely, being obsolete), which is laughable, not to mention futile. I hope they'll be out of business soon so we can look back at their stupid whining in a few decades and heartily laugh at the faint memory of copyright while we freely access the shared knowledge, culture and information of mankind.