Downhill Battle wages uphill fight vs. music industry

Boston.com / A&E / Music: "Worcester, of course, is home to the world-famous Centrum (playing there this month: Yanni!) and the first radio station in America to play the Beatles, WORC. It's also now the home base for Downhill Battle, an activist group founded in 2003 by four twenty-somethings determined to end what they see as the ''major label monopoly' that's ''bad for musicians and music culture,' according to the group's website.

This month, Downhill Battle is sending a belated Christmas present to the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, two Washington-based industry lobbying groups. The gift: stockings filled with coal.

Downhill Battle opposes the lawsuits that the two groups have filed against technologies like BitTorrent and Napster, as well as more than 7,000 individual users of file-sharing software. So in December, Downhill Battle decided to launch its own fund-raiser for three digital rights defense groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation: For every $100 donated to the groups, Downhill Battle would send one lump of coal each to the RIAA and the MPAA.

The special delivery is only the latest of the group's Abbie Hoffman-esque actions. (Hoffman, you may recall, was born in Worcester.) On the day after Thanksgiving 2003, members went to a Wal-Mart and Best Buy near Worcester to slap bright red stickers on CDs being sold there. One sticker read, ''Warning! Buying this CD Funds Lawsuits Against Children and Families."

Last February, they organized an online protest called ''Grey Tuesday," in which more than 150 websites posted a copy of Danger Mouse's ''The Grey Album," which blended Jay-Z's ''The Black Album" and the Beatles' ''The White Album." This was after EMI, which controls the Beatles' catalog, had served Danger Mouse with a cease-and-desist order, demanding that he stop producing and distributing ''The Grey Album." The protest lasted 24 hours.

Downhill Battle's founders, Wilson and Nicholas Reville, don't view Internet file-sharing as a problem. They see it as the foundation for a new, legal music distribution system."