Came across news this fine day about the RIAA settling with a woman on one of their music-pirating crusade cases because she didn’t even own a computer at the time. But what really struck me was the facepalm of this paragraph:

[Mavis] Roy, of Hudson, New Hampshire, had been charged by four record labels with downloading and distributing hundreds of songs from the Internet. A letter from the record companies’ attorneys in July 2007 directed her to a web site where she could pay by credit card to settle the case. Since she did not have a computer in her house at the time she was alleged to have downloaded the music, she ignored the requests. “For many months she thought it was just a scam…”

Why do we even bother these days? Remind me to never wonder when people say, “Well, how are we supposed to know what is a scam or what isn’t? Good question, and unless the English is broken and stupid, we really don’t know anymore. Be paranoid.