An All-In-One RIAA bash

I never thought something like this would happen, but I have seen 3 articles today bashing the RIAA (and one doing so for the MPAA) for different reasons.
The first (Ray Beckerman, Recording Industry vs. The People) summarizes how the RIAA, to get a certain (relatively small, for the RIAA) sum of money back, spent at least 50 times that sum of money on legal fees alone. (They spent $20 million in legal fees to recover $0.4 million in probable lost revenue.)
Well, now we know that the money recovered probably isn't going towards the artists that the RIAA claims are harmed by music sharing.
Actually, on that note, the second article (Mike Masnick, TechDirt) talks about just that. Though the RIAA claims to speak for artists and musicians, the record labels make millions of dollars, while the artists themselves net absolutely no money. I won't go into the numbers here because the analysis in the original article is much more thorough anyway. What I will say is that when labels like Sony-BMG and industry groups like the RIAA claim that piracy hurts the industry, carefully consider who is actually hurt by lost sales (hint: not the artists).
There is a third article (Mike Masnick, TechDirt) that talks about related screwy accounting with MPAA revenue figures. Basically, film companies manage to claim losses on blockbuster movies because a lot of the supposed costs are actually the company paying a studio or themselves (as far as I understand). Thankfully, this can't last because a few companies are now losing lawsuits relating to these bogus claims of monetary losses. Hopefully a similar thing will happen with the record companies.
If you think all hope is lost for artists who can't possibly make a dime under the conventional system, follow the jump to read the solution.
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