The Recording Industry Association of America has pulled the plug on a controversial program that offered file sharers amnesty from the group"s legal campaign to stop the unauthorized swapping of music files over the Internet.
The trade group quietly announced on its Web site that it had ended the Clean Slate offer earlier this month, but the news didn"t become widely known until Monday, when the RIAA submitted a document to a California court that contended that the program was misleading. Clean Slate had promised not to prosecute individuals who vowed to erase unauthorized content from their computers, destroy hard copies of illegally obtained copyrighted materials and abstain from future file swapping--all in a notarized apology sent to the trade group.