RIAA to Abandon Mass Lawsuits
I just found this article in the Wall Street Journal.
;)
A quick look at album sales in the U.S. shows that they have been dropping consistently since 2004.It looks like the RIAA is abandoning mass lawsuits in favor of a new structure for combating illegal file sharing. I think that it’s a good call since the current practice of suing individuals was clearly not working on a large scale. The chances of getting sued were too slim for people to be scared out of sharing, and there was still never a way to say difinitively that the person being sued was the person who was file sharing anyway. Consider open wireless networks. The RIAA would have to seize computers to prove that the shared files were even taken by the person in question, and to my knowledge, that never happened. The anonymity of the internet must be combated before people think that their actions need to change. Offloading a lot of that hunting workload to the ISPs, which the RIAA plans to do in this new plan, will help bring more file sharers to the RIAA’s attention. What they do with that huge influx of new culprits has yet to be seen, as there will still be no way to prove that the holder of the ISP plan was the one file sharing. Do the ISPs then pin responsibility for network security on the customer? The RIAA plan is to issue several warnings to copyright violators provided to them by ISPs, as well as throttle their net speed as punishment. The RIAA is also reserving the right to sue, but expressing a desire not to progress that far down the line of punishment. I’m not a fan of throttling, but until another solution is found, it might be a viable deterrent. I’m just thinking that if my net speed is having enough trouble handling my email and basic browsing, the first thing I would cut is any P2P software hogging my personal bandwidth. If it’s not me that’s sharing, but I have an open network, I’m going to close my network to keep the bandwidth for myself.
I also thought it was a good move by the RIAA to not release the names of the ISPs they’re working with. That would very easily lead to an unfair market for the ISPs since customers would simply elect to use the ISPs not cooperating with the RIAA.
Both this article and my previous article, Major Labels in Favor of P2P, suggest that any solution to massive file sharing is going to involve the cooperation of ISPs. I think Jim Griffin’s plan to roll in a fee with ISP service to pay copyright holders might be more alluring to the ISPs themselves, as it’s a fee that they collect rather than a new department that they need to spend revenue on. I can’t imagine that cooperating with the RIAA is going to be any ISPs top priority either, so we’ll see how this plan works in practice rather than theory.
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