James Delahunty
7 Feb 2006 13:26
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sued thousands of file sharers in the United States for copyright infringement for distributing music through P2P networks. These distributors are better known in the P2P community as "uploaders", which, judging by how P2P works, effectively should make 99.9% of P2P users "distributors". Of course, that sounds ridiculous when you think of the amount of people who don't realise that uploading is considered distributing, or don't even know they are uploading at all.
According to "Recording Industry vs. The People", in November 2004, the RIAA admitted that most P2P end users whose files are in a "shared files folder" don't even know that their files are in a shared files folder. The RIAA made this claim in testimony before the Federal Trade Commission. So it appears, even knowing that most P2P users don't know they are doing wrong, the RIAA has no problem labeling them "thieves" and suing them. The exact wording by the RIAA is below...
"As an initial matter, P2P software may, upon installation, automatically search a user’s entire hard drive for content. Files that users have no intention of sharing may end up being offered to the entire P2P network. Continued sharing of personal information is hard to avoid and is facilitated by confusing and complicated instructions for designating shared items. A study by Nathaniel S. Good and Aaron Krekelberg at HP Laboratories showed that "the majority of the users…were unable to tell what files they were sharing, and sometimes incorrectly assumed they were not sharing any files when in fact they were sharing all files on their hard drive."