Since the RIAA first started its lawsuit campaign against those who share copyrighted music online just over two years ago, they insisted on sticking to this method ever since, filing round after round of lawsuits. So far, they have sued a very wide range of people, including those found to be sharing 1,000's of tracks to young children and even people not owning PCs, not to mention suing the deceased! The first thing they try to do is get those whom it sued to settle their case for just under the cost of fighting the lawsuit, such that the person being sued would rather just settle it than to face a horrifying task of trying to prove their innocence by fighting their case in court.
So far, the RIAA has sued well over 15,000 individuals and has shut down several file sharing services including the original Napster, several large OpenNap servers and AudioGalaxy. Unfortunately, each time they succeed in either closing off a network or flooding it with fake content (such as with Kazaa), former users simply jump ship to another one. As a result, the stronger P2P networks, including those used by eMule, Limewire and BitTorrent all end up growing stronger with more users and in turn a wider range of shared content.
In the end, it is pretty clear that the answer to dealing with P2P is not lawsuits. All the RIAA lawsuits end up doing is harming or deven destroying the lives of innocent people, especially those who can barely afford to pay off the settlements. While the music industry is keen on using DRM as a way of fighting off piracy, this has proven worthless, since the only people it affects are those who actually purchase the content. A clear example of DRM being a recipe for disaster is the recent scenario with Sony using rootkits in its DRM. Finally, despite all the fuss the RIAA puts up about dropping sales as a result of file sharing, apparently the RIAA's profits just keep going up, year after year.
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Why's this? Because since the dawn of of file sharing, they've been on a crusade against file sharers with lawsuits ready to be sent to everyone who's ever touched a computer. Up until now, the RIAA have sued more 15,000 people for sharing music on the internet, and shut down numerous sites and services including, but not limited to, Napster 1 and AudioGalaxy. The lawsuits were fired at everyone from dead grannies to 14-year-old-schoolgirls. The RIAA sue people claiming that they're losing massive amounts of profit because of file sharing. They are in fact earning more and more every year. They sue people no matter who they are, no matter if they actually did "infringe", and no matter what kind of situation they may be in, forcing them to pay them a settlement fee that's cleverly priced at slightly under the cost of fighting the lawsuit, making people more likely to settle just to get it over with. |
As it has been over two years since the RIAA began its lawsuit campaign against file sharers, it is about time that they find something else to try besides legal action and using DRM technology. The problem they have is that they simply cannot get on with new technology. For example, Voice over IP is starting to become a major threat to the telephone business, since users can call each other for free (or very cheaply) using their existing Internet connection, yet we do not see the telephone providers trying to enforce new laws that would make it illegal to use VoIP software or place voice calls over the Internet. Most just rely on the fact that the average user would sooner pickup their trusty fixed-line phone as apposed to placing a call online.
Feel free to discuss about the legal issues with file sharing networks on our Music Download, Peer to Peer (P2P) & Legal Issues forum.
Source: P2PNet
