Music industry watch

RIAA plans to sue file uploaders

After many years of saying that they are not going after tech companies (Napster, Grokster, Audiogalaxy, et al) they are finally going to go after people who do the actual copyright infringement.

This is obviously designed to be a scare tactic, since even if they take the live savings of all the sued uploaders they still won't begin to cover their losses or expenses.

Fred von Lohmann put it best at the second P2P conference when he said:

It doesn't make sense for them to go after the little guys. The amount of money they can get some the little guys amounts to a rounding error on their lawyer's bill for suing them.

Let's look at this further -- if the squeaky wheel gets the grease, then the most prolific uploaders get sued. Each court case is likely to yield net losses to the RIAA, so they can't sue too many people, otherwise they will go bankrupt faster than they already are. Finally, you probably need to live in the US to be sued by the RIAA.

Then, given that there are millions of uploaders, the uploaders just need to make sure they don't become the most prolific uploaders and they should find saftey in numbers. I don't think this RIAA campain will do much good -- just more harm for themselves, and that is all fine by me.

Carry on!

Posted by Mayhem at June 25, 2003 10:28 AM