In their never-ending quest for most absurd litigation to make its way into the apparently oblivious judicial system, the record industry is stepping it up a notch. No, it wasn’t enough to steal from their own artists and corrupt the legal system, or to sue a single woman for $80,000 per allegedly pirated song (oh wait, it got reduced to a mere $2,250!), or sue dead people, people who don’t even own computers, and the entire radio industry. No, now they’re taking on the country that – as we all know – is home to the most ruthless criminal networks of the Americas. You know, Canada. Who knew that aside from being a country full of pretty nice people whose greatest crime may be occasionaly finishing sentences with “eh?”, Canada is also a hotbed of profit-robbing music piracy? As far as I knew, the only threat that Canada had brought to the established music industry recently was a really awesome indy scene, but the RIAA sees things a little differently. Fortunately, this may be one of the last times that you’ll have to endure wingnuts like me ranting about this; dinosaur labels like EMI are soon likely to be laying about in massive heaps gasping for their last breaths like their metaphoric counterparts at the end of the Jurassic period, as they continue to blame their $2.7 billion losses on piracy rather than their failure to adapt to competition. I tend to get a little over-the-top when I discuss this topic; for a much more sane overview from an artist’s point of view, check out this New York Times piece by Damian Kulash Jr. of the band OK Go, in which he calmly describes how EMI’s disabling of the “embed” feature on YouTube has probably lost them exponentially more than what they made by “protecting” their property.