RIAA to stop lawsuit campaign against suspected file sharers
Friday, December 19th, 2008Causing Hell’s blazing mercury to cool for just a tad bit, the Record Industry Association of America, one of the most polarizing industry groups out there, is halting its practice of initiating legal action against suspected online music pirates.
Utorrent? Yestorrent…
As Wired’s Epicenter blog reports:
The RIAA is planning to replace its “subpoena, settle or sue” process that has been expensive for the music industry. It requires the RIAA to go through the courts in order to pressure those it suspects of sharing music without permission.
Instead, RIAA agents will seek out those sharing music without permission (usually by conducting its own P2P searches), and will e-mail the music sharer’s ISP alerting them to that activity. The ISP will then either forward the RIAA’s e-mail or send the subscriber a warning e-mail telling them that music sharing is not permitted.
If they continue to share, the subscriber will receive one or two additional warnings, after which the ISP will slow their connection. If the allegedly infringing activity persists, the subscriber may find their internet connection stops working altogether.
It’s not clear that by dealing directly with the ISPs the RIAA will be more effective in combating online music piracy. If we’re to take a February Comcast case where a subscriber sued over the company’s practice of throttling P2P traffic, the RIAA may have a different kind of PR fiasco on its hands – not to mention the slew of privacy issues over how ISPs identify users. The RIAA says it won’t ask for identifying information, but keep in mind that this is the same organization that sued the pants off of women without computers, dead people, and school children.
(Photo by Liam Higgins - Flickr )
