Douglas C. Merrill used to work for record label EMI, one of the biggest members of the RIAA. He was forced out just a year later, but now he's sharing information from inside the company. And some of that information points to an interesting conclusion about music pirates: they often end up being some of the music industry's best customers. Speaking at a conference in Sydney, Merrill said that a profile they'd conducted of users of the LimeWire music sharing service portrayed them as some of the biggest spenders on iTunes. "That's not theft, that's try-before-you-buy marketing and we weren't even paying for it," Merrill said at the show, "so it makes sense to sue the
