The RIAA Sues 482 More People

An anonymous reader writes "Today the RIAA said they have sued another group of people, 482 to be exact, for copyright infringement. The RIAA used their 'John Doe' litigation process in this round of law suits, because they do not know the names of the copyright infringers. After appeals court ruled that Verizon does not have to provide names of customers to the RIAA, the RIAA started using the 'John Doe' litigation process." (Similar stories at Wired News and CoolTechZone).

Comments

How long will this go on?

[MacGoldstein]

I wonder when they'll ever figure out that suing your consumers is not an effective business model?

Re:How long will this go on?

[loid_void]

No, I think the think the question really should be: How can the recording industry be so stupid as to be represented by an association that by it's very actions drives it's customers away. Oh yea I forgot, the industry choose them. Then they deserve to die the slow death that they have chosen.

Re:How long will this go on?

[dasmegabyte]

When people stop buying CDs from RIAA artists. Which, after close to three years of this nonsense, they haven't. In fact, according to SoundScan, OTC sales are actually up.

So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that suing potential customers IS an effective business model, if you get more money from the suit then you would from their potential sales and if other customers want your product so much they're willing to buy from you even as you screw them. And seeing as how they're settling for $3k+ from filesharers who aren't likely to be buying 160+ cds any time soon, it looks like this is going to be just another line item in the budget. $5,000,000 from price fixed cd sales here, $2,000,000 from recouped advances, and another mil or so from suing grandmothers and preteen girls. Very effective; and you don't even have to call a sleazy accountant to do the books.

Re:How long will this go on?

[grumpygrodyguy]

Oh please.

Don't act so smug and self-righteous. Congress has been degrading the public's right to access information for far too long. It used to be that you could go to places like the library and rent tapes, casettes, and relatively new novels.

The 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Act and other recent IP acts extend the copyright term to something like 100 years. It's appalling, and serves no purpose other than to allow big corporations to buy and sell our cultural history just like so many other commodities. Our parents generation enjoyed the proper balance between protecting innovators and the public. It's clear that our current leaders have no respect for the value of the public domain.

We're raised on music, movies, and games only to learn that we have to pay a tithe to revisit our childhood. There's no reason we should stand for that. 5-10 years is more than sufficient time to ensure that an investor/artist is compensated. Until congress stops selling out the average american to corporations, there's no reason the average american should respect the acts of congress.

Re:Overall total?

[BrickM]

So according to Wired's total (and their settlement estimate), the RIAA is looking at $10,500,000. That's pretty impressive for a bunch of copy-n-paste lawsuits. Any lawyers want to estimate the RIAA's legal costs for this campaign?

More info, please

[cove209]

I have two questions regarding this: 1- The RIAA is filing "John Doe" lawsuits (they will add the names later after the discovery process or warrants are served or whatever). At this time, they are trying to use the ip addresses to establish the identity of the people they are suing. How come the ip addresses are not posted in the news stories or on the eff page if it is public information and is in the lawsuit? 2- Exactly how is the RIAA obtaining their information? Are they seeding songs with data in the tag so they can then say in court that this song was slightly modified and now has a unique filesize or date in the tag and we alone have put this song out there and let people download it? And if so, can they legally do that? They are not a law enforcement agency, can they say that the laws regarding copyright don't apply to us since we own the copyright? OK, more than 2 questions: 3- Exactly what applications are the people using when they download this stuff? Kaaza? If it is Kaaza, are they then looking int he default shared Kaaza folder for the song they have seeded? I have found NO websites that have this info. Any thoughts?

Uploading is the key issue...

[Brandon Glass]

I wonder why more people don't realize this, the RIAA are actually balancing on the edge of a knife with this one: They want to stop copyright infringement, but they don't want to draw too much attention to the copyright infringement via P2P issue, because they realize that if too many people start paying attention to it, the masses will realize what the law actually says regarding this.

Downloading isn't the key issue, uploading is. Copyright infringement is traditionally defined by unauthorized distribution - so they really only have the right to go after those who are illegally distributing their content. This means the uploaders. Depending on your P2P client, it is possible to prevent uploading, or at least stop uploading by removing the file from the P2P system as soon as it's downloaded - of course, in some cases this will render individual P2P networks unusable if too many people do it, but some, like Emule/Edonkey, have the ability to upload while downloading... so unless they catch the culprits very quickly, removing the files from the shared directory and thus preventing further uploading will take all of a few minutes, and no charges can (theoretically) be pressed.

Re:Sue Happy

[loid_void]

Exactly, and just like Prohibition, no one stopped drinking, everyone just got a little more careful.

Re:Anonymous P2P

[SB5]

The RIAA is being VERY STUPID. The only thing they are going to do is make P2P stronger. Probably stronger than the internet.

It will eventually become very decentralized, very efficient, probably encrypted, use really good hash file verification systems.

And it is going much faster than it probably would have if the RIAA didn't step in....