But are we ready to welcome back the beloved Backstreet Boys?

New Kids on the Block recently attempted a comeback. The height of their comeback was a cruise they took with fans, which can be equated to something like a booze cruise full of middle-aged women unwilling to give up their crushes on Marky Mark’s little brother.

The Backstreet Boys’s new album, “This is Us,” will be released on October 6 from Jive Records. This is the first CD the group’s released since 2005. Let’s cross our fingers for some midnight release parties. Hopefully all the mommies can find babysitters.

Apparently, they are thinking that they can rise to fame to the extent they once were, at least that’s what they’re hoping for. What they can expect is some attention from faithful fans and probably nobody else. The teeny boppers are already in love with the JoBros, and the people who were fans have grown up and their music tastes have evolved.

I guess we can’t blame aging stars for trying to grasp at that final strand of fame.

For years, the RIAA has earned bad press and a bad reputation along with it for all its attacks on average people over copyright infringement for downloading and distributing a handful of songs, while others who serve and distribute thousands of songs a day were unscathed because they simply knew how to avoid detection better.  The scare tactics employed did nothing more than make the RIAA appear to be a desperate band of old men scrambling to keep things from evolving past their archaic design made simply to limit artistic freedom and line the RIAA’s board of director’s pockets with gold.

So when the chief spokesperson for the RIAA says that digital rights management is dead for music, disbelief is the first emotion that comes to mind.  This is a company that has spent years trying to prevent online music distribution and keeping people in the way of purchasing compact discs for their music pleasures, preventing listeners from picking and choosing what songs were worth listening to and skipping the filler tracks.

Because of its resistance, it’s lost the opportunity for corporate evolution and the ability to keep revenue coming in by embracing the new medium.

It seems now, though, that the RIAA has resigned itself to a soon-to-be obsolete status, as artists take more control over their property and free music becomes more the norm.

Perhaps now game developers will take another look at DRM (digital rights management) and come to a similar conclusion.

But the judge gave faulty instructions to the jury in claiming that the RIAA did not have to prove ownership of the material in question.

This lead to the retrial, where the woman believed that she not only would be vindicated, but strike back at the industry for what is believed to be the biggest case of RIAA corporate greed and overreaching scare tactics against its consumers.  Even copyright law experts agree that the RIAA has gone overboard and is in the wrong in several cases, not to mention that public sympathy for their movement to sue users has eroded severely over the years.

The new jury didn’t see it that way, however.

Instead, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a mother of four, was hit with near maximum penalties of $80,000 per song, bringing the total damages to $1.92 million.  Though this would appear to be a court victory for the RIAA, the public response, noted by Reuters, is against it.

The accessibility of music through online resources (and not having to pay for filler songs that make up the majority of most CD’s), users have more freedom to enjoy what they want to listen to without buying what they don’t.  Most Americans can agree that $80,000 per song is excessive, and now there is a renewed interest in anti-copyright activists to lower the damages that can possibly be awarded in these cases, or even modernize copyright laws that essentially provide a legal monopoly to the RIAA for products it doesn’t have a creative interest in or own.