The RIAA is taking the Gruebel family to court for sharing Avril Lavigne songs on a p2p network. The Texan family has a surprising ally in their fight against the RIAA's now infamous anti-consumer, over-litigious policy - Nettwerk Music Group - Avril Lavigne's record label.

Nettwerk Music Group, the biggest privately owned record label in Canada, has stepped in to offer financial and legal support in the case, and are outspoken opponents of the RIAA's shenanigans.

Canada.com reports:

“Suing music fans is not the solution, it’s the problem,” Terry McBride, C.E.O of Nettwerk Music Group, said in a statement. “Litigation is not ‘artist development.’ Litigation is a deterrent to creativity and passion and it is hurting the business I love. The current actions of the RIAA are not in my artists’ best interests.”

It looks like maybe there are people on the corporate side of the music biz who still believe in music as an artform rather than just a cash cow - they just happen to all hail from the far north and represent acts like Avril Lavigne (we're using the term "artform" loosely here.)

Or, I suppose it's also possible that Nettwerk have the keen vision to see that the RIAA's policy - the "threaten the people who buy the majority of your products with lawsuits, tell them that they won't be able to afford taking you on in court, demand money from them" method, is a business paradigm so brazenly counterintuitive it sounds like it's cribbed from a Bizarro World issue of Superman.

Regardless of what kind of bands Nettwerk hypes (I'm purposefully not looking at their roster of acts, tacitly endorsing Avril Lavigne in this post is quite enough for me) they're fighting the good fight, and providing us with plenty of inspirational quotes about copyright along the way - check out this one from Charles Lee Mudd, Jr., the lawyer Nettwerk have provided for the Greubel family:

Mudd issued the following statement: "Since 2003 the RIAA has continually misused the court and legal system, engaging in misguided litigation tactics for the purpose of extorting settlement amounts from everyday people — parents, students, doctors, and general consumers of music. In doing so, the RIAA has misapplied existing copyright law and improperly employed its protections not as a shield, but as a sword.”