RIAA staff members were often seen around the office wearing Napster t-shirts. The mood among the directors was more glum. They had concluded that the music industry had lost the file-sharing wars, but they had to keep up appearances in order to keep getting money from the music companies. After all, the RIAA is a Washington-based association and their customers are member music and entertainment corporations.
Their last ditch strategy was a legal one that involved suing individual "copyright infringers." They eventually rolled out this strategy, as everybody knows.
The RIAA understands that the file-sharing war has been over for some time, but the music industry just doesn't get it. Look at their reaction to Steve Job's latest words about DRM technology. The legal strategy they are pursuing is purely to scare people into doing less file-sharing. It's what the techies call "FUD" when they talk about Microsoft: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Plus, they understand that the average person will panic when faced with the threat of a lawsuit. The RIAA's strategy would be toast if the people they sue just laughed them away.
It's simply impossible for the RIAA, the corporations, or the government to stick the genie back into the bottle. Thanks to the Internet and digital technology, intellectual property has entered an era where information wants to be free. Another way to describe this situation would be to point at the Star Trek universe with its replicator technology. When you have the technology to transform matter and energy into any kind of physical object, you've entered a post-scarcity situation where there isn't much need for capitalism.
The RIAA strategy would have worked back in the 1980s, when they put a big dent into home taping of albums using cassette tapes. It was easier to levy a tax on blank cassette tapes. They can't do that to the Internet.
Chuck