Month: October

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It has been five years since the RIAA began its legal campaign against peer-to-peer file sharing and illegal downloading. At first, the 261 lawsuits filed in 2003 seemed to deter illegal downloading. The number of people under 13 years old who illegally downloaded dropped from 20% to 11.8%, even though that was an anonymous survey of Internet users conducted six times a year. RIAA supporters point to the fact that if this number had not gone down and if they had done nothing about this problem at the time then illegal downloading would be much worse than it currently is. Still, 2/3 of kids aged 9-14 say that they surf the web unsupervised and 59% say they download music themselves with no parental assistance. The industry needs to do more to help children obtain music legally, probably through prepaid accounts and gift cards. This PR nightmare for the labels has also started to see the individuals targeted by the lawsuits start to fight back. These lawsuits have frequently targeted children, grandmothers, and unemployed single mothers because IP addresses cannot identify the individuals. Judges have vacated judgments, overturned rulings, and slashed settlement fees. The RIAA has been countersued by some defendents and some major universites of Maine, Kansas, and Wisconsin have begun to refuse to cooperate. Rather than target its own fans and create more label-basing press, the RIAA needs to consider new tactics in fighting illegal downloading. This new services available that offer free, on-demand streaming and DRM-free downloads, the industry needs to focus on promoting these new sites rather than attacking their own consumers.

Month: June

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The RIAA has a team of individuals working hard to crack down on illegal downloading. This group investigates peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and is seen as vital to the successful future of the recording industry. Despite its efforts, the demand for pirated content online is still high and it is hard to see how much illegal downloading their actions have deterred. To root out illegal downloading activity, the RIAA works with MediaSentry, which has developed customized programs that operate over the Gnutella Network, the same as many popular P2P networks. The company has a list of song titles owned by RIAA-member company and gives specific hash codes to each song file. If more than one user on a network has the same song file with the same hash code, they know it is being shared illegally. The company can also download songs that they do not already have to see if they are RIAA-owned by "fingerprinting" the recordings. While a copyright owner cannot sue every person who downloads their song illegally, they can notify the infringer's Internet service and block their material. If the RIAA identifies a user with a popular hash code of just one digital file, it is enough to send a take down notice to the ISP. Many universities claim that they are being targeted illegally, but the RIAA says that is not true and not technically possible. They find what they find through public means. The RIAA uses litigation against only the most egregious of users. When that happens, they file the suit and target the IP address's registered user. OF the tens of thousands of suits filed against commercial ISP's, universities, and individual file sharers, only one has reached trial.