The RIAA has been running a campaign against online music filesharing now for over a year. The RIAA were using a 1998 law to force ISP's to hand over subscriber information on individuals suspected of sharing copyrighted music through P2P networks. Verizon challenged this saying that the RIAA needed to file a formal lawsuit to get customer information and a U.S. appeals court agreed. It ruled that the RIAA must first launch an anonymous "John Doe" lawsuit in order to get customer details.
The U.S. Supreme Court today rejected an appeal by the RIAA without giving any comment on it. It is likely that this will not affect the RIAA's action on illegal filesharing as they have sued more than 3000 P2P users since the appeals court ruling. The sad fact is that the RIAA are not alone now. The IFPI has also begun suing European P2P users, claiming they have done everything they can without legal action to try to deter filesharing. That is very strange as I have not seen even one ad on TV or anything about filesharing, except for Sky News reporting on the lawsuits and a Discovery documentary on movie downloading. It just appears that the recording industry is very quick to the trigger when they see another problem that is going to destroy the music industry, like the recording songs from the radio epidemic, if you can remember it.
Source:
News.com
Source:
News.com
