The Recording Industry Association of America has decided to finally cease its (largely ineffective) strategy of deterring piracy by suing individuals accused of sharing music files on P2P networks, though existing cases will proceed to trial or settlement. Their lawsuits, besides being a P.R. disaster and singlehandedly teaching an entire generation to hate the music industry, often ended up being settled for far less than the exorbitant damages claimed. According to the RIAA, the legal fees alone often exceeded the settlements (a pyrrhic victory, if I’ve ever seen one.)
The industry group is instead opting to work with internet service providers more directly, serving copyright infringement notices via the ISP to subscribers accused of file sharing. Repeated notices, effectively functioning as warnings, would eventually result in the ISP cutting service to the subscriber. In exchange for their cooperation, ISPs would no longer be forced to turn over personal subscriber information to the RIAA.
Too little, too late, or a step in the right direction? Post your thoughts.
RIAA Taps ISPs To Fight Illegal Downloads [informationweek]
Tags: Litigation, RIAA
Too little, too late. Though taking corrective action now is good, I really don’t see how actually doing this will help the RIAA in its cause. Still, any kind of cooperation between the RIAA and the ISPs is good, so long as they’re not violating the privacy of the end users, which I believe is what really aggravated people most, well, aside from massive lawsuits totalling hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention court and legal fees.
Where did they honestly expect people to get the money for it all? Especially if you put someone in prison, they’re not able to work, and then they take all of their personal belongings, how would that have even added up?
Well, in the end, I think things will be a little bit better, and maybe the RIAA will learn something from this. Maybe everyone will learn something from this. Other than the obvious “piracy is wrong” sort of lesson that is obligatory at this point.
Ironic how you just started posting to your blog again, when only last week I deleted it from my bookmarks, figuring you had left it behind. =P
Honestly, I am a little less than thrilled at this announcement. Firstly, the RIAA has recently started to see some legal pushback against their lawsuits. So this announcement may be an attempt to paint the situation as if they are the ones in control. But also it’s a way to bypass the system they were starting to falter in, because…
Secondly, lacking judicial oversight — and without the expense of getting lawyers involved — you can bet the RIAA will be filing A LOT more of these notices than there ever were lawsuits. I wouldn’t be surprised if they program bots to do the job, much like the ones that crawl YouTube and fire off automated DMCA takedown notices. And getting your internet access cut off? For what most people consider the digital equivalent of *sharing* in the real world?
Assuming this is actually implemented, I wonder if this will be effective at curtailing piracy, or if it will merely drive people to P2P darknets. If darknets do become the new reality, it would ironically be even worse for ISPs than the current generation of decentralized P2P, because packets must be transmitted not once (from the seed to the peer) but many multiple times (from the seed, through multiple anonomyzing nodes, and then finally to the peer).
However, darknets tend to be slow and complex. So the RIAA’s plan may indeed be effective at making people stop filesharing, if most people think the alternative is too much effort even for “free” content.
[...] the RIAA’s promise to stop suing people, the organization admitted that their outstanding lawsuits would continue. One such lawsuit, [...]
[...] The technical details of this bill were not immediately clear, such as whether offenders’ home internet would be shut down or whether they would be somehow ‘blacklisted’ by multiple ISPs and access points. However, compared to the fines in the United States, this is a much more reasonable punishment that is in line with what the RIAA has promised to do in the future. [...]