You’ve got to hand it to the recording industry. Any organization with a modicum of sense would have cut its losses long ago in the battle against downloading. The music industry just keeps digging in deeper.

Now it says it’s illegal to rip songs from a CD you paid for onto your own computer.

Yeah, I know. It’s the first thing anyone who has a CD collection does after installing iTunes - uploads CDs to listen to on the iPod.

But as reported by Marc Fisher in The Washington Post, a lawsuit against a Scottsdale, Ariz., man brought by the Recording Industry Association of America says he broke the law by having 2,000 songs on his computer that he ripped from his own, legally purchased CDs.

Let’s put aside the very real questions of privacy this raises. What this does is put the industry’s hypocrisy in an even more glaring light.

Jonathan Lamy of the RIAA told me last month that the lawsuits target “people who are distributing songs, making them available to enormous amounts of strangers.”

Apparently that’s not entirely accurate. Now they seem to be targeting anyone with music on their computer, whether you’ve ever visited a peer-to-peer file sharing site or not.

Following the RIAA’s way of thinking, consumers who already have purchased a CD are now legally beholden to purchase the same music again as a download if they want to listen to it on their computer or portable device.

Despite the inevitable industry protests, this latest harebrained scheme isn’t meant to protect the artists - the ones the RIAA has systematically ripped off since day one. It’s a sick and damn near insane attempt to scare up a few more dollars for the labels’ coffers.

Like a cornered rat that knows the jig’s about up, the RIAA is lashing out in every direction, just hoping to find an out or at least draw someone else’s blood in the process.

It’s time to put this beast out of its misery. And ours.