Courthouse Rock

摘要

Joyce mullen's new car has a CD player, so this year the 53-year-old administrative assistant for Lucent began purchasing discs, most recently a Cher collection. But her relationship with the music industry changed last Monday, when the phone rang in the house she shares with her family on a leafy street in Methuen, Mass. It was a reporter asking how it felt to be sued by the giant corporations who sell the CDs she'd been buying. Her husband―who never touches the family computer―was among the 261 defendants in suits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). What made the family liable for millions of dollars in penalties were the 1,080 or so songs downloaded by their 21-year-old daughter Meghan and shared with the world via an Internet file-sharing service called iMesh. Joyce Mullen won't be buying music for quite a while. "If you're going to lose your house," she says, "how are you going to buy a CD?"