Sometimes the RIAA is completely justified, and this is one of those cases: the organization has shut down Muxtape, a service that provided free music "mixtapes" over the Web, according to WebWare.

"RIAA had gotten wise to the considerable amount of music that was being hosted and played on the service," the report said, "bringing it into the same tier as some of the streaming radio services that have had to pay considerable licensing fees just to stream tracks to its users."

Fred von Lohmann, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's senior intellectual property attorney, had said in an earlier article that a site like Muxtape was "only able to scrape by if it did not reach a critical mass, and if it had good legal ground both in principle and on paper." This will be a good test case for that theory.