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May 8, 2009, 04:03 PM ET
Recording Industry's Antipiracy Campaign Lingers, but Federal Law May Loom Larger
Rumblings this week about the recording industry’s antipiracy offensive centered on what form it’s taking in the supposed post-mass-lawsuit era.
Ray Beckerman, a lawyer in New York who writes the blog Recording Industry vs. the People, went looking for new lawsuits against alleged illegal file-sharers, found three, and called the Recording Industry Association of America’s stated end of its mass-litigation campaign a “total fabrication.”
Ars Technica characterized the RIAA as cagey, for fudging the definition of “new cases,” but the lawyer Ben Sheffner, on his blog Copyrights & Campaigns, said the “new” lawsuits were just “conversions of previous ‘John Doe’ suits against defendants whose names have now been revealed through the subpoena process.” Wired.com headlined its item “Nothing to See Here.”
Indeed, the announcement back in December was that the RIAA would stop suing groups of students — and, in fact, that the trade group had already ceased doing so. That meant an end to more than five years of periodic batch lawsuits against computer users, notoriously college students, who the industry said were illegally sharing copyrighted music files. “Batch” remains an operative word.
“We’re working diligently and in good faith to move cases forward and out of the pipeline and offer reasonable settlements,” a recording-industry spokeswoman told The Chronicle in an e-mail message this week. “For those who refuse, we must continue with the case and move it through the legal process.”
After having seen increased “takedown” notices from the RIAA in February, some colleges now report a drop-off, attributing it, in part, to institutional policies that discourage students’ music piracy.
Federal law, which now requires colleges to “effectively combat” copyright violations with “a variety of technology-based deterrents,” may supplant RIAA threats as an incentive, beyond the moral imperative, to rein students in. Regulations that explain what “effectively combat” means are still being hashed out by appointed negotiators who meet for the final time next week. —Sara Lipka
Each day on Wired Campus, The Chronicle's technology reporters highlight key IT developments and put them in perspective.
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