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!

[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: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: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.