RIAA File-Sharing Lawsuits Top 10,000 People Sued

An anonymous reader writes "While Firefox broke the 50,000,000 barrier today, the RIAA broke a more dubious barrier this week: It has now sued over 10,000 file sharers for copyright infringement, making it a good time to ask if the RIAA will ever throw in the towel. Taking an academic look at what's best for the industry, this economics article shows the financial upside to P2P file sharing. And on the flip side, this legal article argues that file swappers have a constitutional right to pay much smaller penalties than the millions of dollars they can be liable for under copyright law, making the RIAA's lawsuits much less profitable."

Comments

You're asking the wrong question

[geekee]

"It has now sued over 10,000 file sharers for copyright infringement, making it a good time to ask if the RIAA will ever throw in the towel."

Isn't the question to ask, when will people stop sharing copyrighted music online illegally? There's no reason why the RIAA does not have a right to sue these people. It doesn't matter how many arguements you put forward saying the p2p is good for the music industry, the copyright owners still have no obligation to do what you see is best for them.

Two questions:

[suitepotato]

1. Would people have still bought the CDs in the same number they've downloaded individual MP3s had the CDs been unrippable? No. They foist on us a pre-packaged collection of tracks, only a couple of which are the popular most likely to be downloaded songs which they pushed relentlessly. Also, a couple of songs which might be liked but aren't being pushed for radio exposure.

We're about as likely to want to spend $20 on a CD to get just two songs as we would be to spend what we currently do on gas on the pumps and thanks to MP3s we have a choice.

I would say that they don't get it that we are willing to pay per song for only the songs we want and not for the bundle of two goods songs plus crap at an arbitrary rate, but they do get it. Thye just don't want to change because they are greedily addicted to their top-down command model of "you will pay for and get what we say".

2. Does anyone note that the artists are even more of a bunch of sheep than the listening public? These are the people who make almost no money off the CDs by comparison to the record companies. Whenever I think of Metallica's foray into becoming the butt boys for the RIAA, I harken back to a skit on The Ben Stiller Show and something about a drum stool.

Secure distributed file sharing is coming on fast and soon enough just about everything shared on the net will be spread across the network like a coherent concept across a neural net and their lawsuit onslaught will be stymied by inability to catch any one person with a complete incriminating file. We're progressing to the day when information in raw form will float across a network sea like Ghost in the Shell and if they don't get with it soon, we'll forget about ever paying for anything of theirs at all.