The RIAA: More Bark Than Bite

“Demonstrating once again that much of the music industry’s threats against P2P users are often more bark than bite, Emory University announced that eight of the nine lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America against file-sharing Emory students have been dismissed. Although the reasons for the lawsuit dismissals are still unknown, the fact that such a large percentage of the lawsuits against students in this institution were unsuccessful takes much of the wind out of the RIAA’s over-hyped boasts that file sharers named in these suits don’t stand much of a chance.

Of the approximately ten thousand lawsuits that the RIAA has filed since June 2003 against US file sharers – nearly all against Kazaa/FastTrack users who enabled browsing of their shared file lists – only a very small percentage of these suits has ever resulted in any kind of ‘settlement’. Many of these announced lawsuits get dropped for a variety of reasons, perhaps the most common being that the internet service provider no longer has IP logs available dating back to the time of the alleged violation, so the actual P2P user remains forever unknown.

The RIAA is more than willing to issue press releases on a regular basis proudly announcing the number of P2P users who have been targeted in each round of lawsuits. However, they conveniently choose to keep mum about many relevant details – such as the number of failed lawsuits – that might not exactly be “on-message” and project the image that the RIAA seeks to maintain: namely to scare the wits out of all the many millions of P2P users, all but a tiny handful of whom will likely never have to pay out even a dime for using P2P.

Since losing the Verizon decision, The RIAA has been forced to file “John Doe” lawsuits against the IP address of each unknown file sharer, rather than having the ISP provide them the identity of the suspected file sharer prior to filing suit. As a result of relying on each user’s IP log records – which all ISPs will eventually destroy when they overwrite – to reveal a user’s identity, it is not uncommon for the ISP’s log to come up empty, resulting in a dropped lawsuit, thereby letting that particular person off the hook. The total number of these dropped lawsuits is anyone’s guess; the RIAA isn’t talking…”

Read the rest @ P2PCore