Thursday, September 01, 2005

RIAA Commences 754 New Lawsuits

Digital Music News reports that the RIAA has commenced 754 new lawsuits:

"RIAA Issues New Round of Lawsuits, 754 In Latest Sweep

"Like clockwork, the RIAA has issued another round of lawsuits against individual file-swappers. The trade organization will now seek the identities of 754 file uploaders from various ISPs through its "John Doe" court clarification process. The RIAA named P2P applications Kazaa, Grokster, and LimeWire as part of the sweep...."

For complete article go to:

http://digitalmusicnews.com/#090105riaa

See also Story at p2pnet.net

2 comments:

Jonathan said...

There seems to be mounting evidence that the RIAA has made some real mistakes in their lawsuits, and also evidence that they don't care, preferring to strong-arm innocent people into handing over gobs of cash and trumpet "wins" against file sharing.

There have also been rumors that they contract out the identification of "copyright infringing" IP addresses. One wonders what the terms of those contracts are -- do they pay contractors by the IP address? Is there incentive to generate as many IP addresses as possible? What oversight is there in this process to ensure that the RIAA isn't basically extorting entirely innocent people for cash with bogus lawsuits?

What on earth can be done about this? Is our legal system supposed to work this way? And what can someone do who is a target of this sort of thing? Most of us can't pay to defend against this sort of corporate misbehavior.

Jonathan said...

One other thing --

If it were up to me, I'd make the RIAA and its corporate execs pay very, very dearly for their behavior in all of this. Not only would I make them pay back everyone they've extorted, with interest, but I'd make the execs personally pay for the emotional distress they've caused every one of their victims, plus enough to ensure no one ever tries this sort of thing again.

What are the chances of something like this happening?