A new report from nine entertainment trade groups, including the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), admits that the mass copyright infringement lawsuits the industry has favored over the past few years are not doing anything to curb piracy in addition to not making them money.
The report was filed with the US Commerce department this week in response to a recent entertainment industry inquiry about "copyright policy, creativity, and innovation in the Internet economy."
The industry makes it clear that they know it’s time to consider new long-term copyright protection methods.
"The role of lawsuits in solving the online theft problem is clearly limited," wrote entertainment coalition representatives. "For instance, bringing clear-cut claims against major commercial infringers is not by itself a solution in the long run. These cases take years to litigate and are an enormous resource drain."
Unfortunately, these groups still don’t see anything wrong with their litigation tactics and, instead, seem to blame the fact that defendants are fighting their charges longer than they had anticipated. For example, they mention that, "the LimeWire defendants were able to drag out the litigation for four years. Such massive civil cases do not provide a scalable solution to the full scope of the problem."
They also place blame on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for containing loopholes that cause a lack of cooperation from internet service providers (ISPs). In the report they refer to these loopholes as "an excuse to do nothing to combat pervasive and even blatant infringement."
So what is their proposed solution? Hunt down a few “repeat infringers” and make an example out of them, of course.
“A credible threat of meaningful sanctions against repeat infringers on non-campus networks would send a powerful message,” a portion of the report reads. “It would not take many such instances to significantly change subscriber behavior and deter millions of other users from casually engaging in copyright theft.”
Well, apparently they’ve not quite realized all of the errors of their ways. The “example” that the RIAA has set with Jammie Thomas-Rasset’s $1.5 million fine likely won’t serve as quite the deterrent they’re hoping for. It’s time to abandon these witch-hunt tactics and think outside the box to find ways to combat piracy that don’t look like extortion rackets.
