Eminem Sues Universal for Royalties on Downloading
[via RollingStone] Eminem’s two-year-old lawsuit against Universal Music Group over digital music royalties finally entered a courtroom today, the Wrap reports. In a trial featuring star witnesses like UMG head Jimmy Iovine and Apple’s Steve Jobs, Slim Shady’s publishing company F.B.T. Productions is seeking more royalties from purchases made using digital music services like Jobs’ [...]
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…
