For many newspapers, Brianna LaHara was too good to be true. What better way to get readers inside an important but complicated story, namely the lawsuit launched on Sept. 8 by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), against 261 average internet music users around the country?

Pre-teen Brianna LaHara is one of the hundred being sued by the RIIAA for illegal music downloading.

LaHara is a 12-year old girl who lives in Manhattans Upper West Side; and, though it might be tough to explain a rash of lawsuits and the technology behind them, it was certainly easy to explain how it feels for a pre-teen to be sued by the recording industry. It feels bad.

Brianna LaHara said she was frightened to learn she was among the hundreds of people sued yesterday by giant music companies in federal courts around the country, summarized the New York Post on Sept. 9, before quoting poor, shaken LaHara: I thought it was OK to download music because my mom paid a service fee for it. Out of all people, why did they pick me?

Yeah, why her? She is, the Post reported, an honors student who, when found by the paper was helping her brother with his homework. Of course, the point of the lawsuits, at least in part, is to show that regular peopleeven regular, overachieving 12-year old girlsare committing a crime when they download music off the Internet.

The LA Times took a similar tack as the New York Post in reporting the music industry suit, using as their test case the Bassett family of Redwood City, Calif. Speaking to the Times, Mr. Bassett sounded downright baffled by the trouble his family was in. He and his wife dont download music, apparently, but their teenagers and dozens of their friends do. Had he known what was going on, [Bassett] said, I would have pulled the plug.

Can I just call them up and say Im sorry and give them back all the music that was downloaded? says Mr. Bassett to the Times, displaying a startling level of technical incomprehension or a sly pretense of idiocy. Im just a little guy.

USA Todays report on the RIAA lawsuits (many of which were settled within 24 hours, including young Briannas) including some notes on the record industrys other big tactic to save itself: slashing CD prices.

Last year, music shipments fell to $12.6 billion. Record sales so far this year have dropped 8.6 percent, says Americas paper. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Desperate indeed: The worlds biggest music company, Universal Music, announced last week that it will drop list prices for CDs starting Oct. 7 to help kick-start sales. Virtually all top-line CDs for artists such as Eminem, [Mary J.] Blige, 50 Cent and Shania Twain will list for $12.98, down 25 percent or more from the current $16.98-$18.98. Selling prices could drop as low as $9.98.

Theres nothing like wholesale assault on an industry to bring prices down to somewhere approaching the reasonable.

Dreaming of a New Chicago

A company with the cheerful and optimistic name of TheatreDreams put in its bid for a portion of Chicagos theatrical future (and history), as reported by City Hall reporter Fran Spielman in the Sun-Times.

The storied Chicago Theatre would be transformed into a center for the performing arts active 200 nights a year, including a family-oriented Christmas spectacular, under a $3 million deal advanced Tuesday [Sept. 9], writes Spielman. City-funded improvements are underway; the goal is to get the theatre up and running by 2008. Spielman notes that TheatreDreams is run by a fella who used to be president of the Kennedy Center

and speaking of that historic institution, the General Accounting Office (GAO, an arm of the Federal Government charged with keeping all the other arms from throwing our money down the toilet) had some questions recently for the Kennedy Center, as reported in the Washington Post on Sept. 11.

A new GAO report, focused on the centers construction of new parking and exterior areas, said what originally appeared to be a $28 million job wound up costing about $60 million more and created only about half as many new parking spaces as estimated. The GAO said the poor management raised questions about how officials will handle the massive additions planned for the center over the next 10 years.

Anyone who has tried to go see anything at the Kennedy Center in the last year or so, and wound their way through a maze of scaffolding and dust, might be wondering the same thing.

Indian Givers and Takers

Prepare yourself for one of the great feature article lead paragraphs. Its from the Denver Post, dateline Sept. 2, byline Anne C. Mulkern.

WASHINGTON-- Deep in the storage rooms of Harvard Universitys prestigious Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology rests a dark-haired doll in a wooden coffin, a childs prized possession with a sad and sordid past.

The doll, it turns out, was once part of the burial site of a Klamath Indian girl, until it was yanked from its grave by an early 20th century tomb raider, who passed it along toHarvard University. Now, along with Chicagos Field Museum and some of Americas other most prestigious storehouses of national lore, Harvard is owning up to its history of grave robbing from the Native Americans.

According to the paper, a growing cache of federal documents reviewed by The Denver Post shows the widespread scope of the practice and the complicity of museums in acquiring Indian items, for both scientific reasons and financial gain. Its a situation with faint parallels to the centuries-old controversy about items plundered from ancient Greece and brought to Britainthe most famous being the Elgin Marblesexcept in this case the items in question are religious artifacts stolen from gravesites in one part of a country and brought to museums in another part, all in the name of the ongoing scientific inquiry of white people into the enduring mystery of non-white people.

Are you proud to be an American yet?

The Feds passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, which requires the museums to be more responsible and to own up to their past offenses, says the Post. But some of those offensives are regrettably recent:

Harvard accepted an iron hatchet and iron-carving tool from a Pawnee grave in 1985 from Boston benefactor William H. Claflin. They came from the collection of his father, William Claflin Sr., who had sponsored excavations of Native American sites.

This should be a bigger story than it is..

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