Is it safe to say that the music industry has really reached rock bottom?

The latest in a string of parasitic lawsuits in which one of the few artists still making big bucks these days finds Rihanna, the hardest working woman in show biz, being sued by a ECW Wrestling star Paul Heyman, who claims she stole the idea for her risque album cover from an ECW jock jams compilation that came out in '98.

Compare the two covers here.

Now, I was willing to entertain the notion that Coldplay may have lifted some of Satriani's stuff for 'Viva la Vida,' only because some crusty A&R relic may have introduced them to it at some point or other in the recording process. It's a stretch, but, hey, anything's possible, right?

Was Yusuf Islam piling on by claiming same? Probably, but he was more or less indifferent, and he was promoting a new album at the time.

This is the worst thing about being a music critic today: I should've studied intellectual property law instead. I'd be richer and I'd be able to make more sense of what's happening to this sorry industry and the abject hackery that seems to fuel its sputtering engine.

There's no way Rihanna stole that idea from an ECW compilation. It's possible that the megacorp she works for may have also produced that album, but it's not exactly novel for a beautiful woman to appear nearly naked on an album. And the barbed wire thing? What's next? A lawsuit from Pamela Anderson claiming that Rihanna stole the idea from her big screen flop, 'Barb Wire'?

This is getting way out of hand. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and I think it's safe to say that lawsuits like this are as close to extortion as you can get within the law. But when the most committed music fans are doing things like actively hacking their favorite artists online accounts to steal their albums (Animal Collective and Deerhunter fans are creeps, fyi), the casual fan plays nonchalant pirate, and the rest simply don't care all that much about music, you have to do something to keep a roof over your head.