From Boing boing via Wired:

The Huffington Post just appointed former RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen as its new political director. Rosen presided over the RIAA's total and utter failure to come to grips with the Internet, the period in which the record industry rejected every single overture of money in exchange for licenses to its catalog from venture-backed P2P companies, choosing litigation over cash, and leading to a world in which the majority of music consumption online is illegal and doesn't give a dime to the record industry.

Nevertheless, Rosen is also an old-time political hack, epitomising the wing of the Democratic party that has progressive politics on every issue except the Internet: they're all for freedom, except for when it comes to that magic wire that delivers freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and freedom of speech in one package. As far as that wire goes, one Police Academy or Brittney Spears download is grounds for termination of access to the net (and confiscation of every cent you can lay claim to).

The RIAA is possibly the only company in history to conceive of a widespread campaign to sue their own customers.  They heavily target college students and other young people who they believe are sharing files.  Their usual method is to abuse the US discovery system, filing an illegitimate subpoena to find out their targets' identities, then dropping the case and asking their target directly for a settlement of about $2,000, with the threat of a lawsuit for many times more (up to $9,000 per song) if they don't pay up.  The RIAA is also heavily lobbying to spread USA-style copyright law around the world.  Right now they have a a bill in Canadian Parliament that would be significantly worse than the US Digital Milennium Copyright Act, which dramatically reduced consumers' rights.  Ms. Rosen was certainly not the worst of the RIAA's CEOs, but she is not the kind of person I would like to get my news from.