I’ve been quite public about my distaste for the RIAA and its pathetic methods. I’ve called for people to stop buying CDs of artists who belong to the RIAA in hopes we can avoid giving those litigious vipers anything more to fuel their anti-entrepreneurial crusade, but you may ask yourself (as I did), “How do I know who’s with the enemy and who’s safe?” That’s an excellent question. With their roster changing regularly and new mini-labels popping up here and there, it seems impossible to know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. Enter the RIAA Radar. The RIAA Radar uses the Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox to index the item you are viewing on popular sites like Amazon.com against the RIAA membership list to indicate whether a CD is safe to buy or not. When viewing the artist’s purchase page, it displays a helpful message over the album picture to indicate whether this album is “clean” or not. If the artist is an RIAA member, the message is red (buying this album pays for your lawsuit at some point) or green (indicating profits from your purchase are unlikely to be used against you). I cannot express enough how important a tool like this is, or urge you enough to use it to make informed decisions. As such, these are explicit instructions on how to install and use it: 1> Go to the Greasemonkey for Mozilla homepage and install the plugin under Firefox 2> Restart your browser and install the RIAA Radar Greasemonkey script. 3> Restart your browser again and continue about your business. To test I went to Amazon and searched out Metallica, which predictably came up Red. I then searched for Skinny Puppy, which happily displayed Green. I encourage you all to contribute to the RIAA Radar site to support someone who did something good for us all.