Petteri Pyyny
21 Jul 2003 15:48
RIAA claimed during the weekend that is has managed to win already 871 subpoenas against individual American P2P users. With subpoenas, RIAA forces ISPs, universities and other Net service providers to hand out individual users' personal details so that the trade group can use those details in order to sue the users.
According to Associated Press's informations, RIAA doesn't even bother checking the volumes of file trading -- in some subpoenas there are only five copyrighted songs listed that users have shared through the P2P networks.
RIAA says that it will try to negotiate with most of the individuals in order to get the cases settled outside court and expects to see damages between $750 and $150,000 for each song that has been distributed by the users over the P2P networks.
While RIAA's tactics are getting harder, users are fighting back as well. Tools such as PeerGuardian are getting more and more popular as they block well-known RIAA's, MPAA's and various other copyright holders' and FBI's IP addresses from accessing their computers. Also, anonymity in P2P networks seems to be the Holy Grail that all the P2P networks are trying to achieve as RIAA and other copyright holders are declaring an open war against file-sharing.
Source: FoxNews