The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of Artists), which represents major labels in the recording industry, stated on December 19th, 2008 that they will no longer sue individuals who violate their copyrights by illegally downloading their music from P2P (Peer-to-Peer) file sharing networks. Instead they will attempt to utilize pirate’s ISPs to get them warned of their violation or even have them disconnected. (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10126914-93.html)
At first this sounds like great news. No more worries about getting sued for downloading your favorite tunes. However, I do not believe most people even worried about this as you would have a better chance of winning a multi-million dollar lottery than getting sued.
Nevertheless, after over 30,000 people were sued by the RIAA, the RIAA has determined that suing people was not advantageous. Oh, and it was also costing them a lot of money in legal fees. Another big factor was probably how the RIAA is now looked up on as sort of the devil of the internet.
The RIAA during their suing frenzy sued young children, single moms, Grandmas, individuals without a computer, dead people, and thousands of John Does among others. These lawsuits were solely based on IP’s the RIAA determined has violated their copyright. Due to many false positives, the RIAA sued many innocent people.
So how did they get false positives? Well, this can happen from IP spoofing, bad comparison of what time the offense took place and the owner of that IP at that specific time, and something new many P2P networks do which is inserting fake IP’s in order to mess up people like the RIAA looking for offenders. Another possibility is someone downloading the music through the person’s home WIFI connection or through a Trojan on the person’s computer allowing the offender to proxy their download through an unwilling participant.
As you can see, suing people was never a good idea. I mean, who attacks their own consumers like that? All the RIAA really accomplished through their suing campaign was winning them a bad reputation and giving file sharing networks such as BitTorrent publicity; which in turn made them even more popular.
So now the RIAA has a new tactic. Instead of suing individuals, they will send threatening warning letters to ISPs of those who download their copyrighted material. Their hope is the ISP will forward the letter to the client and either throttle their connection speed, disconnect them, or do one of those after a three-strike policy.
Will it work? Well, that is to be seen. In my opinion it will not work. Let remember here for a second that about 20% of those who have internet connections use P2P networks and download illegally. This means the bigger ISPs would receive hundreds, if not thousands, of letters from the RIAA everyday. They would have to pay someone, actually many people, to sort through these letters, find out who owned that IP at that time, and then contact by email, phone, or mail the person who the RIAA claimed, key word, violated their copyright. That right there is a lot of man power that will cost the ISP money.
If that is not enough, think about what happens if an ISP disconnects 20% of their customers. If they don’t have your service you don’t get paid, and if you don’t get paid you lose money. Then you have the legal funds that the ISPs would have to pay in order to fight the few individuals who take these ISPs to court for disconnecting their service. Yes I know having an internet connection is not a right, but people will sue.
So, this method the RIAA has come up with will cost ISPs money. That is a fact. Will the RIAA reimburse the ISP for their monetary lose? Somehow I think not. Even if they do the RIAA could never afford to reimburse every ISP of every single cent they would lose for doing this.
So the question is, will ISPs cooperate with the RIAA and should they? I think the answer is no and no. ISPs can not afford to start attacking their customers due to complaints about the RIAA. For one, it’s almost impossible for the ISP to confirm the accusations by the RIAA. Plus, if ISPs start doing this for the RIAA they will be flooded with similar notices from many other copyright big-shots such as the evil MPAA and others.
What about due process? The ISPs would almost have to give some form of due process to their customers in defending themselves against these claims. Other wise both the ISP and the RIAA could be at risk for discriminatory civil suits against them by angry customers. Since there is really no way for the ISP, or even the RIAA to confirm a violation of copyright the customer’s word pretty much wins.
Let’s not forget that it is not even the ISPs place to get involved in issues such as these. Nor are the ISPs required by any law to partake in this new RIAA plan. ISPs are fully protected by the US DMCA when copyright infringement takes place over their networks. Therefore the ISPs really have no motivation or need to become “copyright cops” of the internet.
It’s going to be interesting though how this will play out. Will some ISPs cooperate? Maybe, but I think very few will. Really though, it does not even matter if they do or not. File sharing of copyrighted material is growing and will continue to grow. There is no stopping it. The quicker copyright giants like the RIAA figure this out the better for them. It is time the RIAA stops trying to kill file-sharing and instead utilize it to maximize their profits.
Please feel free to post your comments on this.
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