I was disputing this:
I know that people who choose 1-day shipping for a price mistake to get through are not the "occasional buyers" you describe in your post. with the suggestion that occasional buyers are likely to get faster shipping. Looking back on it, though, I would argue that the 1-day shipping is not relevant, as that only applies to how fast it gets from Amazon to the customer, not how fast Amazon processes it.
I'm not trying to say that everyone was acting in good faith here--I'm trying to say that enough people probably were that Amazon should be approaching this a little differently. If you've got some mystical way to ascertain who was acting in good faith and selectively pardon them while demanding money/goods from those who were trying to cheat Amazon, I'm all ears. Otherwise, Amazon has little legal choice but to honor their mistake, given that the items already shipped.
You may be right for every case where the entire contents of the basket were boxed sets of DVDs. What about cases where there was more to the order? Amazon gets $20, I get 4 boxed sets plus a non-discounted movie.
That's simple logic that you're expected to have prior to law school, bucko.
Also (legitimate question here) I've heard that it is illegal for a company to send you a product in the mail and then charge you after the fact. That's slightly different than what happened here (as there was, in fact, an implied contract between the two parties), but does this issue muddy the waters for Amazon?
As someone who has had this happen to me, I can explain.
What happened in my case was that the vendor put a $100 hold (authorization) on my card for a meal that was around $20. They then charged me $20 for the meal without removing the authorization, because almost all banks will remove the authorization after about a week.
With most debit cards, the authorization actually prevents you from spending that money, even if the money is still in your account. You continue to earn interest until the charge goes through, but you cannot use the money. Any attempt to use the money will result in a denied authorization (if the attempt is with your debit card) or overdraft fees, if a check clears within that time period. Guess which one happened to me.
The problem is that I didn't consent to a $100 authorization. I didn't ask for my money to be tied up for a week. I expected to be down $20 rather than $120, and that caused bounced checks.
Luckily, my bank is awesome about this sort of thing, and after scolding the restaurant, all of the overdraft fees were waived. Nevertheless, it was a serious pain, and had I tried to use my debit card during that period, I would have simply been screwed.
The problem comes when people didn't notice the error, opened the discs, received the notice from Amazon, and then they are expected to pay for Amazon's mistake. Amazon won't take opened discs as returns, and if you really didn't notice the error, then you shouldn't be obligated to pay for it.
Because the above is impossible to determine, Amazon's only moral recourse is to eat the error and let karma deal with the people who took advantage.
First of all, there are many scenarios posted to Slashdot detailing why a person might have missed the pricing error, so I don't accept your implication that everyone who got the DVDs for free were stealing.
What I will say is that you are mixing morality and legality here. Stealing is a legal issue, not a moral one. From a legal standpoint, Amazon probably doesn't have a leg to stand on. From a moral standpoint, the people who intentionally took advantage of the mistake are slime.
However, I take great offense at this statement:
Come on, you can lawyer your way around the T&C all you like Companies like to jerk consumers around with T&C all the time. They have hidden, arbitrary limits to usage, "bait-and-switch" price changes (not in this case, obviously), attempted restrictions on fair use rights, remote-destruction of the product if they decide that it is not being used within their terms... Fighting them using their own terms is akin to guerrilla warfare. You have to deal with these people on their terms, because they will never deal with you on yours. If they want to take away all the power of the consumer, then they need to realize that they are also assuming the consumer's responsibility.
I imagine that some people didn't notice the error (specifically, people who were ordering other things at the time, or who don't bother to check pricing at the end given all the training Windows users have in just clicking "ok").
Nevertheless, time for a bit of nostalgia.
Coming up on 10 years ago, buy.com made a pretty big pricing mistake on a monitor. No one knew for sure that it was a mistake--it still cost like $50, but it was probably supposed to cost $500 (my numbers might be off, but effectively, the item was off by a factor of 10). Everyone I knew tried to order one, 'cause, hey, big, beautiful Viewsonic on the cheap, right? No one knew for sure that it was an error--this was back when on-line shopping was still fairly new and websites often gave exceptional deals in order to get their name out there.
Lots of people got their monitors. And lots of people didn't. But buy.com honored the price (which was later claimed to be a mistake) for all of the monitors which they had in stock. They cancelled the orders for out-of-stock monitors. I feel that this was a pretty good middle-ground, but that's not the point I'm trying to make.
Ultimately, no one knew for sure whether or not the price was real. If there hadn't been lots of other really good deals at on-line stores, it absolutely would have seemed too good to be true. But I'd like to think that no one thought they were scamming buy.com, no matter how many people e-mailed me and posted on Usenet about the deal. The worst I remember was, "It might be a mistake, and it might be legit, but I don't want to miss out on this awesome deal if it's real." I don't think that's all that bad, especially since limited quantities would mean that verifying the deal with a real person would probably mean missing out on it.
I would say that if the advertised cost is $20, and the subtotal page says $20+shipping, and I'm charged $25+shipping, then I am owed money. The charge was not what the receipt said.
If the advertised cost is $20, and the subtotal page says $25+shipping, and I'm charged $25+shipping, it's my fault for not looking at the subtotal page carefully enough. While it would be a great goodwill gesture from Amazon to credit me $5, they probably aren't under any legal obligation to do so.
Regardless, we generally don't see "corporation protection laws", we see "consumer protection laws" because corporations have a much greater amount of power compared to consumers. In general, while we try to be fair to everyone, we must acknowledge that with power comes responsibility. In an error like this, the consumer shouldn't be made to pay for the corporation's error. I would argue that if Amazon wants to recover their losses, they should look for people who grossly abused the bug and target them with these letters. If they refuse to return the item/authorize a charge, then Amazon may go after them in the courts, but with the understanding that they are likely to lose.
This is probably true for most cases, but what about people who bought other items during the transaction? The transaction was complete, consideration was given to both sides, and if the price came out a little lower, maybe the customer didn't even notice?
Also, how does your example work out for a site which offers something for free? Are you suggesting that after the fact, they should be able to charge you for the promotion? Although we have testimony from people that the box sets probably weren't advertised as free, the only proof we have for the transaction itself is the receipt, which clearly shows a 0.00 charge (and this is often what shows up during a promotion when something is given away for free).
It's a bad situation all around, but in my opinion, it boils down to this: Amazon screwed up, and a non-zero number of customers who were legitimately shopping got screwed in the process. Amazon should suck it up and not break the law by charging those customers.
1) People who are "occasional buyers" might not check their e-mail on a daily basis. My wife checks hers every 3-4 days on good weeks. She might check more frequently if she is expecting an e-mail, or expecting a package which is late, but that doesn't appear to be the case here. Just keep in mind that not everyone lives on-line, and in fact, the very people who are less likely to live on-line are the ones who are most likely to have made the honest mistake here, rather than the scammers (who saw the error because it was posted to sites on-line, where they spend a lot of time).
This is important because Amazon isn't accepting opened returns. If people didn't get the e-mail in time and opened their DVDs, they're suddenly unable to return the movies which were priced due to an Amazon mistake.
2) In fact, casual shoppers might be more likely to get expedited shipping. People who look for deals on-line rather than paying premiums in the store tend to do a lot of shopping on-line, and tend to plan for the delay in shipping. Occasional shoppers are often trying to get something that they can't find anywhere else, and might want it faster than normal shipping allows. Don't immediately assume that the people who got next day shipping were trying to scam Amazon.
It really doesn't matter how you slice it--it's pretty likely that a large number of people didn't notice the error and are now getting screwed by it. I certainly don't think that it's the majority, but my guess is that it's a large number of people. Amazon needs to own up to their mistake, and use it as a learning tool--next time, test your code more carefully.
In this political climate, it's not an undeserved reference. A huge number of Americans believe that the Bible is the word of God, and they also believe that the events in the book of Revelations will come to pass. The question of how a self-proclaimed Christian like George Bush would allow such chipping to occur is interesting, but the question of how many Americans will object is certainly valid, and referencing Revelations in this way brings up that point.
Browsing into "Program Files" throws up a UAC alert. No, it doesn't. By default, all users on the system can read files in c:\Program Files. Thanks for clearing that up. See? Even non-Windows people can spread FUD.
(Yeah, I'll probably be modded down, but it's the truth--the exaggerations regarding Vista UOPs is pretty bad around here)
I've only used Vista a little bit, but I haven't had this experience at all. The key, seemingly, is not to do lots of stuff in the 'protected' directories. When I'm using Windows, I pretty rarely dive into the directories for Program Files, Windows, etc. Doing most OS operations on my own profile don't generate all of the UOP prompts you're seeing. This is with a default install.
Seems to me that the fix is obvious. Change the algorithm.
What they need is to support public key for these things. Giving a unique key to every player, and forcing people to register their players, would mean that if a player key was cracked, they'd know exactly who did it and could file the appropriate charges. This would even help accomplish a wet dream of the MPAA--true region protection. Registration could use a variety of methods to check your location and ensure that you're using the correct region in the correct country. No one would dare sell their players to overseas folks for fear of their key being compromised.
By far, more people use set-top boxes over PCs for watching movies. They might lose a few customers this way, but they'll "make up for it" by maintaining a stranglehold on their content.
It should be pretty easy to fabricate a DRM scheme as useable as FairPlay that would save the number of plays to the ITMS music file, and only allow a certain number of plays before a return. I think an equivalent to "unopened CD" would be "unplayed file".
Returns without something like this would really put Apple in a tough spot. The fact is, you can extract an unencrypted AAC file from your protected AAC file with tools that are already out there. If they start having to accept returns, you can expect a huge influx of people grabbing the music, 'ripping' it, and then returning it.
How about the more obvious example of someone advertising stolen goods in the classifieds section of a major newspaper? Is it the responsibility of the newspaper to check out every classified for fraud? I don't know.
I do know that, as computers and automations have become prevalent, laws have been passed to pass the burden of the crime from the automation-regulator (Google, ISP hosts, etc) to the person actually committing the crime. Look at the DMCA for a fantastic example of how to do this.
Similar laws should apply. In the case of the DMCA, if Google or the ISP starts regulating content, they run the risk of losing their common carrier status. Instead, they wait for a complaint, and then take action. For ads, the burden should be even lighter, because one or two instances of copyright infringement on a site should not be enough to force Google to pull their ads or risk legal trouble.
They may claim that piracy is affecting their sales--and it may or may not be true. But the claim itself is irrelevant. What is relevant is that copyright laws exist and allow for the copyright holder to sue the infringer. It wouldn't matter if piracy actually increased their sales 300%--they still have the right to sue the infringer.
Perhaps you should direct your anger towards the governments that allow for $750 per infringement without any consideration to whether or not the infringement constitutes a loss.
Generally, not if they are acting as officers of the law.
In fact, you can't even file an insurance claim against them if they run into your car while their lights are flashing. They are considered completely without blame in these cases.
In order to get satisfaction, the grandparent poster would first have to prove that the detainment/search was illegal. If it was, then yes, he would have a case for monetary damages. But if they deem that the search was legal, he's out of luck.
I think the BitTorrent protocol makes this difficult. Especially for large swarms, it's possible that they wouldn't catch everyone (not everyone might upload to their tracker). Also, people who don't upload tend to be penalized, exacerbating the problem. And there are untested and very strange legal implications if they do upload....
Also, their assumptions are correct almost all of the time. Though some researchers might use modified clients to connect to trackers without up/downloading, the overwhelming majority of people who connect to the trackers will be people who are in the process of committing copyright infringement. Any court would say that the MPAA/RIAA filed the suit in good faith. If a person is doing research, they probably have evidence to back that up. The case would probably be dismissed or even dropped once that evidence was provided. For the remaining 0.0001% that might get tagged... well frankly, even the US government doesn't always get it right[1], so why should we expect a corporation to be any better?
Now there will be some detractors. Some people will make the broad claim that, "Why don't they just sue everyone on the Internet? You're allowing them some error, how much will they take?" These people don't understand the concept of "gray areas." The RIAA/MPAA know that they cannot sue everyone on the Internet. They also know that, legally, they have to have a reasonable belief that infringement is occurring before they file suit. The definition of "reasonable" in this case is left to the courts, and it's probably a situation where the judge will know it when he sees it. That may not be much consolation, but maybe you can rest assured that if the RIAA started wrongly suing people en masse, the massive backlash and numerous lawsuits that would result would be devastating. They know this, which is why they aren't going to do this sort of thing.
[1] Meaning that the US government and the court system has convicted and imprisoned people who were innocent of the charges against them. DNA evidence sometimes proves this years after the fact.
Although the RIAA/MPAA might like this idea for the purposes of scaring people away, they'd also want the monetary rewards, too. And generally, crimes can be tried bot civilly and criminally (see the OJ Simpson case, where he was found not guilty in the criminal court, but guilty of "wrongful death" in the civil case). Right now, casual downloaders aren't getting criminal charges filed against them. Your proposed change would just add criminal charges, because there's no way that you'd get the law changed to say that copyright infringers can't be sued by the copyright holder.
You may have already discovered this, but in case you haven't, they're talking about connecting to specific trackers where the content is distinctly under copyright, and there is no express right to download given by the copyright owner. They aren't talking about generic use of BitTorrent, despite the Slashdot headline's proclamation.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not trying to say that everyone was acting in good faith here--I'm trying to say that enough people probably were that Amazon should be approaching this a little differently. If you've got some mystical way to ascertain who was acting in good faith and selectively pardon them while demanding money/goods from those who were trying to cheat Amazon, I'm all ears. Otherwise, Amazon has little legal choice but to honor their mistake, given that the items already shipped.
This was several years ago, and I never went back to that restaurant, however I'll keep this in mind for the future.
You may be right for every case where the entire contents of the basket were boxed sets of DVDs. What about cases where there was more to the order? Amazon gets $20, I get 4 boxed sets plus a non-discounted movie.
That's simple logic that you're expected to have prior to law school, bucko.
Also (legitimate question here) I've heard that it is illegal for a company to send you a product in the mail and then charge you after the fact. That's slightly different than what happened here (as there was, in fact, an implied contract between the two parties), but does this issue muddy the waters for Amazon?
As someone who has had this happen to me, I can explain.
What happened in my case was that the vendor put a $100 hold (authorization) on my card for a meal that was around $20. They then charged me $20 for the meal without removing the authorization, because almost all banks will remove the authorization after about a week.
With most debit cards, the authorization actually prevents you from spending that money, even if the money is still in your account. You continue to earn interest until the charge goes through, but you cannot use the money. Any attempt to use the money will result in a denied authorization (if the attempt is with your debit card) or overdraft fees, if a check clears within that time period. Guess which one happened to me.
The problem is that I didn't consent to a $100 authorization. I didn't ask for my money to be tied up for a week. I expected to be down $20 rather than $120, and that caused bounced checks.
Luckily, my bank is awesome about this sort of thing, and after scolding the restaurant, all of the overdraft fees were waived. Nevertheless, it was a serious pain, and had I tried to use my debit card during that period, I would have simply been screwed.
The problem comes when people didn't notice the error, opened the discs, received the notice from Amazon, and then they are expected to pay for Amazon's mistake. Amazon won't take opened discs as returns, and if you really didn't notice the error, then you shouldn't be obligated to pay for it.
Because the above is impossible to determine, Amazon's only moral recourse is to eat the error and let karma deal with the people who took advantage.
What I will say is that you are mixing morality and legality here. Stealing is a legal issue, not a moral one. From a legal standpoint, Amazon probably doesn't have a leg to stand on. From a moral standpoint, the people who intentionally took advantage of the mistake are slime.
However, I take great offense at this statement: Come on, you can lawyer your way around the T&C all you like Companies like to jerk consumers around with T&C all the time. They have hidden, arbitrary limits to usage, "bait-and-switch" price changes (not in this case, obviously), attempted restrictions on fair use rights, remote-destruction of the product if they decide that it is not being used within their terms... Fighting them using their own terms is akin to guerrilla warfare. You have to deal with these people on their terms, because they will never deal with you on yours. If they want to take away all the power of the consumer, then they need to realize that they are also assuming the consumer's responsibility.
I imagine that some people didn't notice the error (specifically, people who were ordering other things at the time, or who don't bother to check pricing at the end given all the training Windows users have in just clicking "ok").
Nevertheless, time for a bit of nostalgia.
Coming up on 10 years ago, buy.com made a pretty big pricing mistake on a monitor. No one knew for sure that it was a mistake--it still cost like $50, but it was probably supposed to cost $500 (my numbers might be off, but effectively, the item was off by a factor of 10). Everyone I knew tried to order one, 'cause, hey, big, beautiful Viewsonic on the cheap, right? No one knew for sure that it was an error--this was back when on-line shopping was still fairly new and websites often gave exceptional deals in order to get their name out there.
Lots of people got their monitors. And lots of people didn't. But buy.com honored the price (which was later claimed to be a mistake) for all of the monitors which they had in stock. They cancelled the orders for out-of-stock monitors. I feel that this was a pretty good middle-ground, but that's not the point I'm trying to make.
Ultimately, no one knew for sure whether or not the price was real. If there hadn't been lots of other really good deals at on-line stores, it absolutely would have seemed too good to be true. But I'd like to think that no one thought they were scamming buy.com, no matter how many people e-mailed me and posted on Usenet about the deal. The worst I remember was, "It might be a mistake, and it might be legit, but I don't want to miss out on this awesome deal if it's real." I don't think that's all that bad, especially since limited quantities would mean that verifying the deal with a real person would probably mean missing out on it.
I would say that if the advertised cost is $20, and the subtotal page says $20+shipping, and I'm charged $25+shipping, then I am owed money. The charge was not what the receipt said.
If the advertised cost is $20, and the subtotal page says $25+shipping, and I'm charged $25+shipping, it's my fault for not looking at the subtotal page carefully enough. While it would be a great goodwill gesture from Amazon to credit me $5, they probably aren't under any legal obligation to do so.
Regardless, we generally don't see "corporation protection laws", we see "consumer protection laws" because corporations have a much greater amount of power compared to consumers. In general, while we try to be fair to everyone, we must acknowledge that with power comes responsibility. In an error like this, the consumer shouldn't be made to pay for the corporation's error. I would argue that if Amazon wants to recover their losses, they should look for people who grossly abused the bug and target them with these letters. If they refuse to return the item/authorize a charge, then Amazon may go after them in the courts, but with the understanding that they are likely to lose.
For people who only ordered box sets of TV shows, this is true.
What about people with other items in their virtual 'basket'?
This is probably true for most cases, but what about people who bought other items during the transaction? The transaction was complete, consideration was given to both sides, and if the price came out a little lower, maybe the customer didn't even notice?
Also, how does your example work out for a site which offers something for free? Are you suggesting that after the fact, they should be able to charge you for the promotion? Although we have testimony from people that the box sets probably weren't advertised as free, the only proof we have for the transaction itself is the receipt, which clearly shows a 0.00 charge (and this is often what shows up during a promotion when something is given away for free).
It's a bad situation all around, but in my opinion, it boils down to this: Amazon screwed up, and a non-zero number of customers who were legitimately shopping got screwed in the process. Amazon should suck it up and not break the law by charging those customers.
Two points of interest:
1) People who are "occasional buyers" might not check their e-mail on a daily basis. My wife checks hers every 3-4 days on good weeks. She might check more frequently if she is expecting an e-mail, or expecting a package which is late, but that doesn't appear to be the case here. Just keep in mind that not everyone lives on-line, and in fact, the very people who are less likely to live on-line are the ones who are most likely to have made the honest mistake here, rather than the scammers (who saw the error because it was posted to sites on-line, where they spend a lot of time).
This is important because Amazon isn't accepting opened returns. If people didn't get the e-mail in time and opened their DVDs, they're suddenly unable to return the movies which were priced due to an Amazon mistake.
2) In fact, casual shoppers might be more likely to get expedited shipping. People who look for deals on-line rather than paying premiums in the store tend to do a lot of shopping on-line, and tend to plan for the delay in shipping. Occasional shoppers are often trying to get something that they can't find anywhere else, and might want it faster than normal shipping allows. Don't immediately assume that the people who got next day shipping were trying to scam Amazon.
It really doesn't matter how you slice it--it's pretty likely that a large number of people didn't notice the error and are now getting screwed by it. I certainly don't think that it's the majority, but my guess is that it's a large number of people. Amazon needs to own up to their mistake, and use it as a learning tool--next time, test your code more carefully.
RFID doesn't work like that unless there are receivers all over the place to send you that information. Or maybe you were just making a joke.
In this political climate, it's not an undeserved reference. A huge number of Americans believe that the Bible is the word of God, and they also believe that the events in the book of Revelations will come to pass. The question of how a self-proclaimed Christian like George Bush would allow such chipping to occur is interesting, but the question of how many Americans will object is certainly valid, and referencing Revelations in this way brings up that point.
(Yeah, I'll probably be modded down, but it's the truth--the exaggerations regarding Vista UOPs is pretty bad around here)
I've only used Vista a little bit, but I haven't had this experience at all. The key, seemingly, is not to do lots of stuff in the 'protected' directories. When I'm using Windows, I pretty rarely dive into the directories for Program Files, Windows, etc. Doing most OS operations on my own profile don't generate all of the UOP prompts you're seeing. This is with a default install.
*shrug*
Seems to me that the fix is obvious. Change the algorithm.
What they need is to support public key for these things. Giving a unique key to every player, and forcing people to register their players, would mean that if a player key was cracked, they'd know exactly who did it and could file the appropriate charges. This would even help accomplish a wet dream of the MPAA--true region protection. Registration could use a variety of methods to check your location and ensure that you're using the correct region in the correct country. No one would dare sell their players to overseas folks for fear of their key being compromised.
Well. It could work, in theory.
By far, more people use set-top boxes over PCs for watching movies. They might lose a few customers this way, but they'll "make up for it" by maintaining a stranglehold on their content.
It should be pretty easy to fabricate a DRM scheme as useable as FairPlay that would save the number of plays to the ITMS music file, and only allow a certain number of plays before a return. I think an equivalent to "unopened CD" would be "unplayed file".
Returns without something like this would really put Apple in a tough spot. The fact is, you can extract an unencrypted AAC file from your protected AAC file with tools that are already out there. If they start having to accept returns, you can expect a huge influx of people grabbing the music, 'ripping' it, and then returning it.
How about the more obvious example of someone advertising stolen goods in the classifieds section of a major newspaper? Is it the responsibility of the newspaper to check out every classified for fraud? I don't know.
I do know that, as computers and automations have become prevalent, laws have been passed to pass the burden of the crime from the automation-regulator (Google, ISP hosts, etc) to the person actually committing the crime. Look at the DMCA for a fantastic example of how to do this.
Similar laws should apply. In the case of the DMCA, if Google or the ISP starts regulating content, they run the risk of losing their common carrier status. Instead, they wait for a complaint, and then take action. For ads, the burden should be even lighter, because one or two instances of copyright infringement on a site should not be enough to force Google to pull their ads or risk legal trouble.
I goofed in my quick reply. I meant "swarms" in place of "trackers". Sorry about that--that distinctly changes the semantics of my comment.
They may claim that piracy is affecting their sales--and it may or may not be true. But the claim itself is irrelevant. What is relevant is that copyright laws exist and allow for the copyright holder to sue the infringer. It wouldn't matter if piracy actually increased their sales 300%--they still have the right to sue the infringer.
Perhaps you should direct your anger towards the governments that allow for $750 per infringement without any consideration to whether or not the infringement constitutes a loss.
Generally, not if they are acting as officers of the law.
In fact, you can't even file an insurance claim against them if they run into your car while their lights are flashing. They are considered completely without blame in these cases.
In order to get satisfaction, the grandparent poster would first have to prove that the detainment/search was illegal. If it was, then yes, he would have a case for monetary damages. But if they deem that the search was legal, he's out of luck.
I think the BitTorrent protocol makes this difficult. Especially for large swarms, it's possible that they wouldn't catch everyone (not everyone might upload to their tracker). Also, people who don't upload tend to be penalized, exacerbating the problem. And there are untested and very strange legal implications if they do upload....
Also, their assumptions are correct almost all of the time. Though some researchers might use modified clients to connect to trackers without up/downloading, the overwhelming majority of people who connect to the trackers will be people who are in the process of committing copyright infringement. Any court would say that the MPAA/RIAA filed the suit in good faith. If a person is doing research, they probably have evidence to back that up. The case would probably be dismissed or even dropped once that evidence was provided. For the remaining 0.0001% that might get tagged... well frankly, even the US government doesn't always get it right[1], so why should we expect a corporation to be any better?
Now there will be some detractors. Some people will make the broad claim that, "Why don't they just sue everyone on the Internet? You're allowing them some error, how much will they take?" These people don't understand the concept of "gray areas." The RIAA/MPAA know that they cannot sue everyone on the Internet. They also know that, legally, they have to have a reasonable belief that infringement is occurring before they file suit. The definition of "reasonable" in this case is left to the courts, and it's probably a situation where the judge will know it when he sees it. That may not be much consolation, but maybe you can rest assured that if the RIAA started wrongly suing people en masse, the massive backlash and numerous lawsuits that would result would be devastating. They know this, which is why they aren't going to do this sort of thing.
[1] Meaning that the US government and the court system has convicted and imprisoned people who were innocent of the charges against them. DNA evidence sometimes proves this years after the fact.
Although the RIAA/MPAA might like this idea for the purposes of scaring people away, they'd also want the monetary rewards, too. And generally, crimes can be tried bot civilly and criminally (see the OJ Simpson case, where he was found not guilty in the criminal court, but guilty of "wrongful death" in the civil case). Right now, casual downloaders aren't getting criminal charges filed against them. Your proposed change would just add criminal charges, because there's no way that you'd get the law changed to say that copyright infringers can't be sued by the copyright holder.
You may have already discovered this, but in case you haven't, they're talking about connecting to specific trackers where the content is distinctly under copyright, and there is no express right to download given by the copyright owner. They aren't talking about generic use of BitTorrent, despite the Slashdot headline's proclamation.