GristyMcFisty and StrongBad used our news submit to tell us about what the RIAA are up to now. StrongBad wrote "The war on the consumer has officially begun. The RIAA has just buried themselves into a hole that will take years to get out of. Hopefully after 130 of those lawsuits are dismissed, 20 are settled and 111 are fought they will realise the error of their ways."
After years of the RIAA trying to fight off Peer-to-peer services, applications and even hardware, they are now taking a realistic mature way. As before, they are not planning on lowering prices or selling online music, but instead going after the users themselves who share music. They have now filed 261 lawsuits against alleged file sharers; most of who were sharing over 1,000 copyrighted songs across various networks including Kazaa, Morpheus and various others.
As we have seen in the last few months, the RIAA have been keeping an eye on who is sharing what and issuing subpoena's to force the ISP's reveal their identity. By using this information, they can determine the best lawsuit 'bait' before going to court. Recently, they began tracing MP3's by examining header information to try and determine if a user is sharing their own CD collection or sharing music downloaded from others. They are aiming to scare of file sharers, so even if a user avoids the risk by downloading and not sharing anything, the selection of songs shared on these networks will significantly decrease.
Originally, the RIAA have targeted the peer-to-peer services themselves such as now defunct Napster and Audiogalaxy, but have lost their patience and are after the file sharer's themselves. They are expected to have thousand's of lawsuits filed in the coming months. For the lawsuits that go to trial, the RIAA is expected to ask the court to decide on appropriate damages rather than going choosing the potential fines up to $ 150,000 per copyrighted work infringed.
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The lawsuits, which were filed in federal courts across the country, are the RIAA's latest tactics in its war against the illegal file sharing that record companies blame for plummeting CD sales. In June, the RIAA promised to sue hundreds of Internet users suspected of illegally trading music using file-swapping services like Kazaa and Morpheus. The association in August clarified that it only would target the most egregious file sharers. RIAA President Cary Sherman in a teleconference today characterized the people who were sued as "major offenders" who distributed about 1,000 copyrighted music files on average. The amnesty program, reports of which surfaced last week, would require file sharers to admit in writing that they illegally traded music online and vow in a legally binding, notarized document, never to do it again. The amnesty would not apply to anyone the RIAA already has subpoenaed for information regarding file swapping. "We're willing to hold out our version of an olive branch," Sherman said. About 57 million Americans use file-sharing services, according to Boston-based research firm the Yankee Group. Among the most popular are Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster, which rose to prominence after a federal judge shut down the pioneering Napster service in 2001. Kazaa says that its file sharing software has been downloaded more than 200 million times. |
The RIAA say that paid music services will offer convenience comparable to peer-to-peer networks, but this is not true. If a user downloads an MP3, they are free to put it on their portable MP3 player, take it to a friend's computer and even burn it to CD. The same freedom is not available with legal music services. Some users who purchase tracks off a legal service presume that it's now OK to re-download their song titles they purchased off a peer-to-peer network to get an MP3 version for their portable player or to burn on to CD. Therefore, legitimate services still force users to resort on peer-to-peer networks to get unrestricted versions of their purchased music. Vivendi Universal's Emusic.com is an exception by providing unlimited MP3 downloads with no usage restrictions for a flat $ 9.99 monthly rate over a year's subscription. 😉
The music industry probably don't realise that if they do successfully manage to kill off peer-to-peer networks, downloader's will simply find another way to obtain their music. As college & university students make up a good portion of peer-to-peer network users due to their limited income, they may simply change to copying CD's from mate to mate or even recording off the radio (streaming, satellite and over the air). This has been done before P2P networks using cassette tapes and there's little stopping it now with most downloader's having access to a CD-recorder.
Source: Yahoo Technology News
