Record Industry Sues 532 More U.S. File-Sharers

Patik writes "The RIAA today issued 532 new subpoenas for music file swapping, many of them college students using their campus networks. They will not say which ISPs or colleges were involved, but that the users were sharing "substantial amounts" of music files. This brings the total number of subpoenas to 1,977. The RIAA has been averaging $3,000 per settlement so far." Readers Digitus1337 and Warpedcow point to stories respectively at Wired and Reuters.

Comments

Re:Bankrupt the RIAA

[molafson]

Bankrupt the RIAA

It must cost the RIAA more than $3,000 per case to file against file swappers. Lawyers don't come cheap...

This (bankrupting the RIAA by giving them $3000) is as brilliant as bankrupting Microsoft by buying cheap Xboxes (which is to say, not at all brilliant in the least).

Good odds, keep sharing!

[grub]

I've seen numbers that claim 50,000,000 people in the US use P2P applications. Let's do the math:

In approximately 8 months the industry has sued 1,977 people. That's 1 in every 25,290.84 people. Now we get into speculation. Assume:

they keep up their current trend of filing that many lawsuits every 8 months.

the number of P2P users in the U.S. stays static

you were born today, will live for 74 years and are precocious enough to use P2P software today, the day of your birth.

That's 195,064 file sharers they'll sue in your lifetime. Heck, you have a 1 in 256.33 chance of being sued over your entire life, you lucky newborn!

Oh, there's one assumption I forgot to mention:

Assume: The RIAA racketeers are still in business your whole life.

NB: My math may be off, I've had a few cold ones.

this has got to stop...

[Bored Huge Krill]

...but it's only going to stop when the music industry is prepared to work with some alternatives. The EFF proposed a licensing scheme that is a good start, but my view is that it's still missing something.

Here's my problem statement:

1. File sharers like the p2p model as a way of finding new music. They like it partly because it's free, but my suspicion is that there's more to it than that. They like the model. Radio is dead, and the RIAA killed it, via ClearChannel. I'm going to suggest that, given a workable model that preserves file sharing, but allows musicians and their promoters to earn revenues, file sharers will move to a legal model. But it has to preserve the basics of the current open file sharing model.

2. File sharers want to use whatever client they feel like. Any "legalized" file sharing method which forces users into using a specific locked, closed source client is likely to fail.

3. A flat fee system, with built in means to prevent cheating (leaking to uncontrolled distribution) and gaming the system (permitting individuals to artificially inflate download numbers for a particular song) would generate sufficient revenues and a method for divvying up those revenues that would be acceptable to the music industry and musicians.

That's a tall order, but I think it can be done. Consider this:

If you pay a flat fee into my proposed system, you have the rights to:

a. download content with copyrights held by participating contributors freely, by any method.

b. upload that participating content, but only to those that have also paid the fee.

I believe this can be done. To meet my criterion 2, it has to be done by defining a protocol, not a specific client. Criterion 3 can be met by making it trivial to police, to ensure that subscribers aren't cheating. So here's my protocol, at least in a cartoon-back-of-the-envelope form:

Subscribers use a client which authenticates with the license administrator's server. This authentication may be long term, results in a symmetric key shared with the server and bound to a subscriber's identity, and which is your proof that you are a participant. The protocol requires that, prior to actually sharing any content (but not necessarily advertizing it) you perform a 3-way authentication with the party that wishes to share your content and the administration server farm. This can be done using a Needham-Schroeder protocol, by which the administration server pushes, on request, a symmetric key to the two parties. By using this protocol, you have fulfilled your obligation to only upload content to participating subscribers. Your proof is provided by the administration server in distributing the key. Note that you don't need to know the identity of the other party; you only know that they are a subscriber. The symmetric key you share with them is then used to encrypt the content you send them.

Data gathering in this scheme is trivial; the administrators take a sample of the content which has been distributed by scanning the upload directories of subscribers. What is measured is the relative distribution of content, not the number of uploads, and because you don't know the identity of the scanning party, it's very difficult to game the system.

Policing is also simple. The administrative server can ping authenticated subscribers to verify that they aren't using any other file sharing protocol.

So, there may be some things in here you find objectionable. But is this a fair compromise? Could this work?

Comments?

Krill