“Peace in our time” – 10 years later the music industry’s highly controversial strategy of suing individuals for illegal file-sharing has come to an end, wants ISPs to adopt a three-strikes policy.
I’ve read the article in the Wall Street Journal three times already and I still can’t believe it. For 10 years, some 35,000 people, and wasted tens of millions of dollars later, it seems the music industry has finally admitted the error of its ways and abandoned the practice of suing illegal file-sharers en masse.
The practice has long been criticized by music fans and artists alike as the RIAA dragnet snared single mothers, poor transplant patient teens, disabled veterans, and even the deceased.
Backing away from the practice, the RIAA now plans to form voluntary partnerships with ISPs whereby it will notify them of IP addresses suspected of making music files available for download and the ISP will then act accordingly, either simply forwarding the warning to the customer, or asking them to stop altogether. Upon repeated warnings then ISP will then presumably begin to throttle connection speeds or disconnect them altogether ala a “three-strikes-and-your-out” plan.
The specific ISPs having these voluntary partnerships with the RIAA isn’t mention by the WSJ or the RIAA, but Cox Communications seems to already have a tentative plan in place under the false guise of the DMCA.
The plan, however, doesn’t mean an end to pending lawsuits, only new ones, and doesn’t count out suing those responsible for large-scale illegal distribution.
RIAA head Mitch Bainwol believes the new strategy will be more effective since it will be able to target more people at the source – Internet connections – and move away from costly litigation.
“Over the course of five years, the marketplace has changed,” he said in an interview. Litigation, he said, was successful in raising the public’s awareness that file-sharing is illegal, but now he wants to try a strategy he thinks could prove more successful.
It seemed only a matter of time really for if you think about it the RIAA’s litigation campaign has been a public relations and financial disaster. It’s spent boatloads of money and raised the ire of both music fans and artists without ever obtaining a single successful conviction of an accused illegal file-sharer in a court of law.
To make matters worse, CD sales continue to slump while Rome burns.
In short, today is a very, very good day for all those in the file-sharing community. The only controversy will be when ISPs begin forwarding letters from the RIAA, but that practice too will eventually come to a halt after people begin losing their connections based on impartial, unsubstantiated “evidence” given to ISPs by unlicensed RIAA private investigators with no oversight or regulation.
jared@zeropaid.com
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This is good and bad I wonder what the Isp’s will do about this nonsense…
It was a movement that started in France and the EU was bullied into stopping legislation that would have blocked such a thing. I guess the real surprise was that it took so long for the US to addopt while France was already headed into this direction. With millions of people being disconnected over this ISPs will see profits dramatically fall and think twice but not before millions get burned in this scheme including most of the innocent people who barely know how to use email.
Translation: Litigation has been to costly so the RIAA is going to scale back to only suing the big boys and try to scam ISPs into doing their dirty work against the little guy.
A lot of this can be traced back to the Obama lobby paper. The MPAA said that France was a “good model” and France has been trying to push the three-strike thing for quite some time now. The writing was on the wall I think.
Well before the ISP’s send a single letter the ISP’s may want to think twice about being a copyright cop.
That can be a slippery slope and if people start dropping their ISP’s it could be a costly one as well.
Also it could mean NEW litigation against the RIAA and ISP’s both if they start to accuse people of things they are not even doing…..the RIAA has been known to sue dead people you know….
The ISP has to disconnect all of their “paying” customers to keep the RIAA happy? Sounds like a losing plan to me. Which ISP wants to lose subscribers (and the revenue from them)? Only if the RIAA pay them the lost revenue will this work. I wouldn’t put it past the RIAA though less money on litigation more on buying off the ISPs.
I see it happen open wifi networks…. Someone geting the letter with out acutally downloading anything…..
Its going to happen if they do this…
they Suck a$$
Either way it’s a clever way of circumventing the DMCA – the very law that the RIAA has been exploiting for years. Ironic when you think about it.
I still don’t think this is going to work. When the ISP’s THEMSELVES start getting cut off by some paying customers and then getting into legal action with other paying customers over their privacy I don’t think this will stand up in court. Though I am not a lawyerso I do not know.
The courts are very protective when it comes to an ISP spying on someone. So all I think this is is a white flag of surrender by the industry.
Has anyone been to YouTube lately? They’ve got any song you could possibly want. If that doesn’t tell the RIAA how futile their efforts are nothing will.
This whole thing has just been a Tom and Jerry cartoon for over 10 years can we just give it a fucking break now! It’s not going to work period! The internet is the last vestige of freedom people have left and they can’t just deal with the fact that the Artistes and customers No longer require nor want the record companies so get over it! and move onto something else stop wasting your money that’s going nowhere and invest it into other prospects…this is how a true business person thinks these aren’t business people at all their fat cats that just want to dominate everything!
Madness. Harassing millions of people all in an attempt to be relevant and remain the gatekeepers between the people and the music. Good luck with that RIAA. You’ll need it.
It would be really bad businesses for ISP’s to cooperate with them mainly for the reason there is no evidence other than their say so that certain persons are being naughty; and we know they have been wrong in the past on several occasions.
So if someone commits fraud through the mail does the postal service stop delivering mail to their house?
Lies i say LIES!
Yes, it is true. Mediacom will shut off your service under this law or action. I will most likely be ending 5+ years as a customer of Internet and Cable. Under the 3 Strikes your out…rule. They sent me a letter stating I will no longer be allowed to carry their internet service because I downloaded a movie. When I called their customer (No)Service line, the person I was talking to was indifferent and did not seem to care that I was going to cancel all of my Mediacom services… totaling $130. a month. They don’t care about their customers more than they care about being internet police. Just so you know it can happen. I will try to update if anything changes.
They may be able to shut down P2P traffic, but how are they going to shut down HTTP traffic? Will they actually monitor the traffic to see which file you’re downloading? I know sites like http://www.myotherdrive.com only send traffic via http to help get through firewalls, etc. Maybe that’s why Comcast has become so slow for me. Maybe they are analyzing what files I’m actually downloading or uploading