p2pnet.net News:- Bradley Buckles, the RIAA’s (Recording Industry Association of America) new gunnery sergeant, “hasn’t been to a concert since attending a Who show more than twenty years ago,” he told Damien Cave in a Rolling Stone interview here.

Buckles – the ex-director of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives – says file-sharing “remains part of the equation,” but illegal CD copying and sales “is the number-one priority”.

Interesting, that, particularly when one bears in mind that his bosses, the Big Five record labels, are at pains to lump to the two distinctly separate activies together in their efforts to paint file sharers as hardened criminals.

“Buckles, 54, repeatedly returns to the point that large-scale illegal CD pressing is on the rise,” says the report:

He’s been doing his best to deal with it but went wrong on March 5th, “with an attempted ban on the Double Black Album, a mix of Metallica’s and Jay-Z’s Black Albums, an action that the RIAA retracted and labeled ‘a mistake’,” states Cave

Buckles was hired in December 8th and since then has spent most of his time “meeting with RIAA agents, the FBI and other law-enforcement officials in order to explain why piracy deserves police attention – “a legal necessity, since the RIAA can’t start criminal cases of its own”.

[Has anyone informed Mitch Bainwal of this? - Ed]

Critics, however, “fear that Buckles will soon be forced to adopt the RIAA’s strong-arm approach to file-sharing,” says the report, quoting EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) legal director Cindy Cohn as saying:

“The people who hired him have lost the distinction between the online and offline world, and I’m sure they’re telling him what his priorities should be. I’m not optimistic.”

Buckles’ focus will depend on “where most of the damage is,” says Cave, adding:

“But he has already told his two teenage children to stay away from file-sharing – ‘They groan when I talk about it,’ he says – and Buckles admits to having no sympathy for people who are being sued.

” ‘It’s the only way we can get at the people who are doing the distribution,” he says, adding, “The industry is bleeding’.”

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