James Delahunty
30 Sep 2005 22:24
Yet another 754 file sharers have become targets of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a group representing major record labels in the United States. The RIAA accuses the P2P users of copyright infringement while uploading songs to other users on P2P networks. This brings the total to around 14,800 targeted so far in the campaign by the major record labels who claim they are fighting for survival.
Out of the entire 14,800 lawsuits, only about 3,400 have ever been settled and not one of these cases have ever seen a proper court case to date. Among the latest lawsuit victims are many students from several universities across the United States. Columbia, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, Boston University, Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley and Princeton were among the 17 universities which received subpoenas.
The RIAA has also taken it's fight to the owners and operators of P2P networks. In a "post-Grokster" technology world, the RIAA has sent cease and desist letters to several major P2P companies demanding co-operation under the Supreme Court Grokster ruling. Under the press several companies have reacted in different ways but only time will show how effective the RIAA threat will be.
As for legal action taken against file sharers, it will be interesting to see a case go to court. It has been asked ever since the first RIAA suit was filed whether or not the RIAA really holds enough evidence against an account holder at an ISP to sustain a lawsuit. Is an IP address enough proof? how does it prove the account holder, or the immediate family of the account holder actually infringed copyright? How does it prove that the computer of the defendant did not fall victim to malicious crackers/software that forced the PC to act as a proxy between the real source of copyright music and the downloaders OR that the machine was intentionally turned into a sort of super music-sharing machine.
Like it or not, these things happen everyday. The practice of hijacking machines to turn them into file servers is nothing new. There are so many questions from a legal point of view that only a proper court case will give us an ultimate answer.
Source:
p2pnet