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Telcos Stand Against RIAA
john82 writes "In an interesting and insightful article, NetworkWorld Fusion discusses how lawyers for SBC and Verizon are fighting the RIAA's attempts to monitor their customers. As we've heard before, RIAA wants the telcos to report when users download any copyrighted material. Lawyers for SBC and Verizon are fighting back. They also claim that the RIAA is trying to grant themselves powers that are outside of even the Patriot Act. Now where have heard that before? NWFusion also points out that RIAAs handwaving, threats, tantrums have less to do with protecting the rights of musicians, than with protecting the revenue stream created by an out-of-date distribution system." In other RIAA news, taped2thedesk writes "According to the Washington Post and Ars Technica, the RIAA will now contact P2P users before suing them." The RIAA's not so bad, they'll settle out of court over the phone, if you don't mind paying up instead of getting a lawyer.
Hopefully if the RIAA directly contacts people it'll come to light all the quicker how random their contacts have been. So far they've claimed to be taking legal action against 300+ people for file trading. Their record at the moment stands at suing four children under 12, almost 10 people who don't have machines to run the software they claim they used, or even accounts with the ISPs they claim they used to download software from, and six people who don't own a PC or have internet access to begin with. By my reasoning 4+9+6 makes for 19 out of that 300 who obviously aren't file trading how the RIAA says, AT LEAST
There are certainly people who will have the software able to trade, the machines to run it, on ISPs the RIAA claims, but who DON'T trade. Whats their error rate hitting then? somewhere up around 10% of people they're taking legal action against
It's shotgun tactics.