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RIAA Sues Nearly 500 New Swappers
Digitus1337 writes "Wired has the story. " U.S. music industry group says it has sued 493 more people for copyright infringement as part of its campaign to stop consumers from copying music over the Internet.
The Recording Industry Association of America has now sued nearly 3,000 individuals since last September in an attempt to discourage people from copying songs through peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa and LimeWire." "
I don't like "John Doe" lawsuits. Today it's your IP address, what is it tomorrow? Your street address? Your DNA? Is there going to be a story on the news about shopkeepers who are suing a set of fingerprints for theft damages?
I know that this is a civil case, not a criminal case, but I think you should still know who you are suing before you can do it. If the RIAA can't figure out who say, 66.35.250.150 is, they can go pound sand as far as I'm concerned. Figure it out and come back, or don't, and drop it. And while you're at it, don't use our criminal justice system to go fishing for you.
I'm interested to see what happens when the RIAA sues a downloader who happens to have already purchased the CDs of the songs he is downloading -- which, in my opinion, would give him a right to those songs since he's already purchased them.
For me personally, I've sometimes downloaded songs from CDs I because 1) it's sometimes faster than ripping it myself, 2) the CD is scratched or broken, or 3) I still have the case but the CD itself was stolen. Would downloading an MP3 of a song from a CD I rightfully purchased make me a pirate?
Why not have a panel of like-minded legal experts sit down and prepare a self-defense template for these mass suings? If the cases are all the same, a cookie-cutter defense should work too. As cases filter through, the defense template could be refined. It would enable individuals to defend themselves against the lawsuits, yet with the experience gained through a peer-to-peer legal network.
I guess the underlying problem is what to do about the apparent file sharing that the internet has given us.
Suing people won't stop piracy.
Any amount of software to stop piracy will be circumvented/broken (see how long a piracy-catch in a Linux kernel will last before it gets cut and rebuilt).
This is one of those things that our tech is going to force us to change socially.... how/when/to what, I'm not sure.
"1.2 million people file lawsuit against RIAA this month. The court system is grinding to a halt, and congress begins deliberations to resolve the problem."
Open Standards Portal
This use to be a big IRS tactic. Go after the guys without the funding to take you on. If the recording industry sued someone with the money and the inclination (sp?) to take them on through a significant series of appeals, then I think that the laws would be changed.
Also, Congress needs to hold hearings on this. The General Accounting Office [GAO], the investigative brance of the Congress, helped get the IRS inline. Now, my personnal feeling about anything being done is that it would be unlikely. (I mean, come on, we call them Congress instead of Progress.) But, just maybe, someone will get a clue.
The RIAA is trying civil court because they know that they can use the 'perponderance of the evidence' to thier own advantage. If they think they are right, let see some criminal charges. Gutless wonders
In God we trust, all others require data.
Brilliant! These folks know that the RIAA doesn't want to actually take anyone to trial, just scare the bejeezus out of Mommy and Daddy so they don't let their kids use Kazaa. The risks are much too high for the RIAA if they should lose, and IMHO it's too much for them to prove, particularly in a college dorm-type setting, that the person they sued was actually the one doing the infringement. What about the wide-open Wi-Fi defense, or the zillion other instances where you just can't prove who was using a specific IP at any given time?
You've been subjected to a frivolous suit and you can't afford a lawyer, so what do you do? If you have lots of company, you all pool your chips and file a class action countersuit. There are limits to just how far baseless suits could go before the consequences become unacceptable. A litigant both unscrupulous and incautious will be eaten by his own greed.
In the meantime, I suppose you do negotiate for a smaller out-of-court settlement or plead "no contest", hoping to recover your loss later when the class suit wins. Audacity usually succeeds in the beginning -- it's only later that it becomes plain whose was the stronger position.
What you don't do is meekly take whatever deal they offer. You push back with whatever you have. Negotiate the best deal you can, and if that is not good enough then you have some breathing space to gather the power to force renegotiation for more favorable terms. And don't agree with false charges; just put off fighting to disprove them until you are prepared to win. In any conflict, never give up anything that doesn't buy you something better.
[*sigh* in case it's not obvious, IANAL and this is not legal advice.]
No need to go to those extremes. Just band together with like-minded lawsuit recipients, and go on a hunger strike! The novelty of it would probably get you enough media coverage to make the *IAA folks rather nervous - like roaches, they really don't like it when people start shining spotlights on them. They want the media to report people folding, not people fighting back and questioning the flimsy sheaf of "rights" that the media conglomerates have built empires around.
Yeah, I agree. I used to be very anti-piracy. I knew that the labels were corrupt and everything, but it wasn't enough for me to justify breaking the law and pirating more than the occasional song. When the lawsuits started though, that was it for me. Legal or not, I'm not willing to pay money to a company when I know my money is going to be used to do things like that. It may be wrong of me to pirate, but IMHO what they're doing is more wrong than what I'm doing.