good news: you can settle your riaa lawsuit online
a must-read article over at wired.com, surveying the effectiveness (or rather the damage done by) the RIAA’s five-year litigation campaign against individual p2p users. over five years, the RIAA has sued over 30,000 Americans for piracy – and only one case has actually made it to court:
Despite a fallow legal landscape, most defendants cannot afford attorneys and settle for a few thousand dollars rather than risk losing even more, Beckerman says. “There are still very few people fighting back as far as the litigation goes and they settle.”
“It costs more to hire a lawyer to defend these cases than take the settlement,” agrees Lory Lybeck, a Washington State attorney, who is leading a prospective class-action against the RIAA for engaging in what he says is “sham” litigation tactics. “That’s an important part of what’s going on. The recording industry is setting a price where they know you cannot hire lawyers. It’s a pretty well-designed system whereby people are not allowed any effective participation in one of the three prongs in the federal government.”
only one RIAA file sharing case has gone to court – that of minnesota mom jammie thomas who was last year ordered by a jury to pay over $200,000 for sharing 24 songs on her home computer. that verdict was overturned last month when the judge from the original case had second thoughts and declared a mistrial – so a court victory for the RIAA is still proving elusive despite having had 5 years to land a guilty verdict.
30,000 pirates settling out of court with the RIAA for a few thousand dollars each – that amounts to a sum of money but surely not even remotely enough $$ to cover the costs of their ongoing litigation campaign. never mind the fact that the money is not redistributed to the artists whose music is at the heart of the debate. the litigation was never about the money, but just about instilling more of that homespun fear into the already beleaguered hearts of americans:
The RIAA admits that the lawsuits are largely a public relations effort… Spokeswoman Cara Duckworth of the RIAA says the lawsuits have spawned a “general sense of awareness” that file sharing copyrighted music without authorization is “illegal.”
yeah, a “general sense of awareness” that if the RIAA decides on a whim to match your IP address to your kazaa profile, and you happen to have been sharing a couple of sade tracks and maybe something from lenny kravitz, you’ll be paying them a monthly stipend of $110 until february 2013.
the most surreal aspect of this – something absurd enough to make me think twice as to whether its some kind of piss-take – is that litigation targets can settle their lawsuit online at www.p2plawsuits.com:
This site will guide you through the settlement process for your case. You can pay the settlement by credit card, using either Mastercard, Visa or Discover. If you wish to pay the settlement by cashier’s check, you will need to telephone one of our settlement representatives.
In order to process your settlement, you will need to have your case identification number. That number appears above the salutation of the letter sent to you by the record companies.
is this for real? or are anti-RIAA crusaders subtly trying to undermine the litigators through the art of really lame web design?
here is the full wired article on the riaa’s 5-year litigation campaign.