Opinion: Anti-pirating plan has potential, needs work
After six long years, 35,000 lawsuits, and countless citizens severely impacted by the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) spread-shot, collateral-damage attack on file-sharing, new litigation against illegal file-sharers will mostly cease.
But that small “mostly” plays a big role in how the music industry will appear to the public, and in how it will continue to affect the lives of others.
By the beginning of this year, the organization of music-biz honchos finally gave up its huge fight to take down illegal downloaders. Originally, the program consisted of tracking Internet users who were frequent pirates, and who had accumulated enough illegal tracks to make the suit worth the association’s while.
But then the problems started. The RIAA’s criteria for choosing their targets was arbitrary and internal, resulting in suits being brought against 13-year-olds and single mothers of teenage downloaders.
Besides this public-relations nightmare, the RIAA also bullied Internet service providers (ISPs) for the identity of the file-sharers who were being watched. This possible breach of privacy, and the obvious reluctance of ISPs to give up their customers, preceded bitter struggles in court, counter-suits, and legal bills that damaged the lives of many defendants.
Retroactively denouncing the RIAA, however, is a little more than useless now. The organization has positively moved beyond its narrow-minded attempts to curb piracy through example punishment and “awareness.” These adjustments are admirable compared to the medieval strong-arming of the litigation, but the RIAA still has some things to learn.
First, the new improvement: the RIAA looks to be revoking its police role on the web to function instead as a watchdog. The group will send an e-mail to the ISP of a user who has gotten attention through any noticeable amounts of illegal downloading and/or uploading.
With ISPs that have agreed to the RIAA’s plan, this e-mail triggers a warning from the service provider to the user, as well as possible slowing of service or access prevention for that user.
This form of punishment achieves a totally different effect than the lawsuits, and a difference that needs to be applauded. Where the lawsuits were aggravatingly public and high-cost, this low-key and private form of punishment helps avoid the backlash still faced by an association with a bad reputation.
It also benefits the user comparatively, eliminating legal fees to fight a lawsuit and merely requiring that, to use the Internet, they cease their illegal behavior.
Perhaps most importantly, the RIAA will no longer require ISPs to provide user identities in these situations. The messages alerting ISPs of illegal user activity will remain anonymous as to the user’s information, other than an IP address.
While these new tactics will hopefully help the RIAA reduce the illegal activity that threatens part of their industry, the organization is sending mixed signals with other decisions.
Despite already announcing the abandonment of the large-scale plan to attack downloaders indiscriminately, the RIAA will maintain all ongoing suits (of which there are many) and “is reserving the right to sue people who are particularly heavy file sharers,” according to a Dec. 19 Wall Street Journal article.
No matter how few these major lawsuits are, they are still too many. While some massive illegal downloaders do break the law to the point of punishment, lawsuits are absolutely ruinous to the individuals involved. The “damages” requested by the RIAA in its suits are extremely high compared to the number of songs downloaded in most cases, if we estimate each song at a $1 value. In each case, the RIAA is suing as a scare tactic where the results are not as important as the negative atmosphere surrounding illegal downloading — a noble idea to discourage others, but one that has proven completely impotent and destructive towards defendants.
To make the transition away from litigation a real change, the RIAA must recognize the importance of concluding only a fraction of its many open lawsuits, the ones that actually matter based on the total number of songs ripped off by the defendants, and foreswear any future litigation.
Or else that insignificant “mostly” will damage the practical new measures the RIAA is taking to defend itself. And just as in an illegal-downloading lawsuit, nobody really wins.