The year has not started out well for the Recording Industry Association of America.

The industry group, which represents the largest music publishers, garnered renewed criticism this week following its apparent assertion in a December legal brief that copying music from a CD into digital format is illegal. In a federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., attorneys for the Atlantic Recording Corp. and other plaintiffs argued that "once Defendant converted Plaintiffs’ recording into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs."

The grammatically-mangled sentence has become the focus of a debate amongst bloggers whether the music industry is asserting that the copies are unauthorized because they have been ripped into the MP3 format or because they are in a shared folder.

The attorney's assertion had the Motley Fool, an investment Web site, warning investors to beware of music companies' stocks.

"As I've said before, a good sign of a dying industry that investors might want to avoid is when it would rather litigate than innovate, signaling a potential destroyer of value," advisor Alyce Lomax wrote in a blog post about the case. "If it starts to pursue paying customers -- which doesn't seem that outlandish at this point -- then I guess we'll all know the extent of the desperation. Investor, beware."

Another technology watcher, InformationWeek's Alexander Wolfe, proposed that the RIAA lose its copyright privileges, calling for Congress to reduce the term of copyrights to 5 years, from the current maximum of 125 years. In addition, colleges are increasingly standing up to the RIAA's attempt to deliver warnings of legal action to the school's students.

Critics have taken the RIAA to task following the group's widespread legal assault on consumers who have offered to share ripped songs on peer-to-peer networks. Last year, the number of legal notices sent to consumers surpassed the 20,000 mark, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. Despite the criticism, the industry group scored a significant success last year, when a jury awarded music companies $222,000 in damages from a person accused of sharing 24 songs on the Internet.

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