RIAA Extends Legal Action

shystershep writes "An article at InfoWorld tells how the RIAA 'is filing 41 new lawsuits and sending 90 lawsuit-notification letters this week, adding to the 341 lawsuits filed and 308 notification letters sent since September. The RIAA has settled with 220 file-sharers as a result of lawsuits, lawsuit-notification letters and subpoenas. In addition, 1,054 users have submitted affidavits as part of the RIAA's amnesty program.' The RIAA also claims that its tactics are actually working -- to increase awareness and reduce online piracy."

Comments

One person doesn't even use a computer!

[jtnishi]

The article on yahoo mentions one of the persons getting sued doesn't even know how to use a computer.

These are getting seriously out of hand...

Re:One person doesn't even use a computer!

[wasabii]

ANd you should read a wee bit furthur, where it talks about the old couple's son in law, who got internet installed, did his music downloading, and then canceled it when he left house. Theft occured under their account name.

Re:One person doesn't even use a computer!

[laird]

"one of the persons getting sued doesn't even know how to use a computer."

It's pretty simple. To quote from the article:

Brenot and her husband said their son-in-law briefly added Internet service to their own cable television account while living with the couple because Comcast Cable Communications Inc. said it would add a surcharge to send separate bills to the same mailing address.

"There's a mistake in this case," Dorothy Brenot said. "We're innocent in all of this, but I don't know how we're going to prove it."

It's a pretty simple situation. The son-in-law set up broadband access, billed to the Brenots. He then downloaded and shared tons of music (774 titles, according to the article), and the RIAA found him and logged his IP address. Then the ISP said that the IP address was assigned to the Brenots, so they are the ones whose name is on the lawsuit. IANAL, but this sounds just like the cases where someone gets a parking ticket based on the license plate of the car, even though someone else parked the car illegally. At least where I live, if you prove that the other person was the one that parked illegally, they pay the ticket.

This is like pretty much all of the other "I didn't do it" cases. Someone was paying for a broadband account that someone else was using, so they got sued for what the other person did. This isn't terribly interesting except to journalists looking for a catchy, if misleading, story, since it's a pretty obvious situation -- I can't think of a way that the RIAA could _avoid_ these sorts of errors, since there's no way for them to know who's actually using the computer, just who's paying for the broadband connection, until they file the lawsuit.

What _would_ be interesting is if the RIAA sued in a case where _nobody_ was doing any illegal file sharing. But so far, out of 382 lawsuits, I haven't heard of any case where that's being claimed. Of course, anything can happen...

Re:Lawsuits

[Anonymous Coward]

RIAA has already said: if you file a single piece of paperwork with the court (e.g., motion of discovery [to see what their evidence is], motion to dismiss, etc.), the settlement immediately jumps by $50,000.

Now, since they are settling everything for $3-5K, and since a good, federal-bar qualified lawyer is going to run $$$, and your downside hits $50K, well, who's the sucker going to be?

It's not nice, but it appears effective

[laird]

Based on the numbers that you can see on Slyck.com, after years of consistent growth, p2p usage is down substantially for the last few months, especially on the networks believed to be actively monitored by the RIAA, with the decline starting at the same time as the filing of the first lawsuits. And based on the announcements by Apple, Napster, MusicMatch, etc., digital music sales appear to be up substantially over the past few months as well. So while coorelation can't prove causality, it sure looks like the lawsuits are effective at making some people stop using the p2p file sharing networks, and might even be helping with digital download music sales.

Re:Anyone know...

[homer_ca]

They're only suing Kazaa/Morpheus users for now, but you can be sure they're monitoring all the P2P networks. "They" being Mediadefender, Mediaforce, Ranger Inc, OverPeer, BayTSP, and others.

Re:I can't wait to see them..

[Skyshadow]

- That crazy guy outside my office who plays a harmonica.

Actually, that's not the RIAA's area. That's the ASCAP (I swear I'm not making that up -- it stands for American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers). They sue bars who have cover bands who don't pay for protectio... er, a performance license. If your crazy guy is playing anything remotely copyrighted, he'd better watch out or that wild paranoia may become justified.

Article in today's Chronicle about them (I linked to it elsewhere in this thread, too -- it's my "Jesus, I'm not really surprised, but Jesus..." item).

ASCAP. Ass cap. Huh huh.

Re:How many again?

[laird]

Actually, according to Slyck, the population of FastTrack users is down about 1m users (it's current around 3.5M from peaks of around 4.5M a while back). Of course, slyck doesn't say how they arrive at that number, but since they're an active promoter of p2p, you wouldn't expect them to make the number artificially low. I'd call a drop of 1/3rd pretty substantial. :-)

Re:Support musicians!

[LordK3nn3th]

File sharing is not theft. Theft is when property is stolen (i.e., someone takes your desk or music CD).

File sharing differs because you are not stealing something unique, you are copying. If I made a desk design and "copyrighted" it, and someone copied my design, it would not be theft, either, it would be copyright infringment.

The two are different.

Re:Legal Samples?

[saddino]

Each sample would likely be fair use, but reconstructing the original work would still be copyright infringment. I suppose it would be just like cutting pages from a book and then reconstructing the book to distrubute for free -- nothing legal about that.

nice quote

[Seraphim_72]

The RIAA also claims that its tactics are actually working -- to increase awareness and...

....use of nonstandard ways to file share ala bittorrents, irc, newsgroups, etc., etc., etc.

Sera

Re:I can't wait to see them..

[The Munger]

Well here is the story of retiree Ernest Brenot, 79, of Ridgefield, Washington. He doesn't own a computer, nor does he know how to use one. The RIAA claims he likes Vanilla Ice, U2, Creed, Linkin Park and Guns N' Roses.

Where the hell do they get these lists from? They can't have got something like that from ISP records.

Re:An interesting question...

[hengist]

Ummm, you can't contract your way out of the law.

Just because you signed a contract with them, doesn't mean that they can commit a crime (theft) with impunity.

I would've told the police about what happend.

Re:from the linked article

[Macadamizer]

Copyrights don't expire through nonenforcement, but there is still a concept called laches, which basically says if you know someone is infringing and you don't do anything about it, after a while it is no longer fair to go after them. Essentially, there is a statute of limitations on when you can bring a copyright infringement suit, and I think it is 3 years from the date that the copyright owner should reasonably have been aware of the infringing activity.

So, in a sense, you do lose the right to enforce your copyright, but there will be a seperate "clock" keeping track of each infringing activity. Just because you fail to follow up on one doesn't mean you can't go after another one later.

Quit using KAZAA ....Use anonymous filesharing.

[zymano]

anonymous filesharing

Article mentions Blubster,Filetopia and ES5.

RIAA is going after your IP number.Kazaa is not protecting you. Be aware.

Good luck.

Re:clear

[MikeDawg]

Good to hear that the employer is so law-friendly when it comes to file-sharing, but not to privacy issues. A company can basically only say "Yes, he worked here." or something along the lines "Yes, he was employed from XX/XX/XXXX to XX/XX/XXXX." They are limited to what they can say, they can't give a reference to another employer saying the grounds of your dismissal (sp?).

But none the less, yes, that is probably considered a violation of company policy, and however your company decides to handle it, is up to them and their policy. It may very well likely be a terminatable offense.

Re:You missed the point

[cpt kangarooski]

Well, the authoritative source is usually the OED. It has a reference from a work called "Brook's String of Pearls" that someone by the name of J. Hancock wrote in 1668: Some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practise to steal Impressions of other mens Copies.

Copyright didn't appear on the scene until the Statute of Anne in 1710. There was of course the Stationer's Copyright that was established by Queen Mary, but that was basically a vehicle for official censorship and isn't really relevant to any discussions of copyright.

Of course, if the term didn't exist, and the RIAA, MPAA, et al were casting about for some modern word to use to villify infringers and the like, I think they would probably call them terrorists.