Vassar Technology Today | RIAA lawsuits against peer-to-peer downloads cost us more than just cash

Matthew Leung Managing Editor

On Jan. 23, 2007 the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) registered for the domain name p2plawsuits.com. No one knew what they were up to with the new site until Feb. 28, when the RIAA posted a press release on its Web site, riaa.com, stating that it was launching “new initiatives” to address illegal music downloads by college students using peer-to-peer (P2P) clients such as Kazaa and Limewire.

Even though the RIAA began suing its own customers as early as 2003, this new modus operandi would send “pre-litigation” letters that list the songs the student has illegally downloaded and offer them a pre-settlement price, ranging from $750 to $1,000 per song. Even though the pre-litigation letters are merely notices, students who ignore them risk being sued for a larger sum. To settle the pre-litigation letters students can pay with a credit card at p2plawsuits.com. According to the press release, 400 “pre-litigation” letters were sent to 13 universities that same day.

On the surface it seems that RIAA’s new initiatives are rational for the sake of maximizing profits. Upon closer examination, however, this new move is suspicious and suggests a hidden agenda of major corporations colluding across multiple industries.

P2P was a clever innovation that created a common platform for people to share data without a central server to store it. Napster, for example, had a central server filled with illegal songs, and it was easy for RIAA to sue and shut it down in March of 2001. P2P clients such as Limewire, however, were generally deemed legal by court on the same grounds as a fax machine itself is considered legal—the illegal material is stored among all its users and not in a central place.

Not only were the music industry’s profits reduced, but so were those of the software and movie industries. These industries had two options: each individual company or industry could have taken measures to protect its intellectual property, or they could have united their efforts to extinguish public P2P networks like Gnutella or Freenet, in the same way that businesses team up to fix prices. They obviously chose the latter option.

RIAA is the go-to emissary to do whatever necessary to make sure that no one will have the nerve to use P2P networks. The only way to do that is to take a total of 20,000 customers to court and condition people not to use P2P by using scare tactics.

Only the RIAA is collecting pre-settlements from college students. Software and multimedia are traded in P2P as well, but Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple are not suing the same people who buy their products. When customers try to download updates for Microsoft’s software, for example, they are scolded with an error message if an online detection mechanism reveals that their copy of the software is stolen. In those cases, Microsoft has the IP addresses of people with stolen copies, but it does not hunt down its own customers to sue them for the potential $300 or $400 revenue loss per copy.

Besides downloading illegal music, the only other illegal online activity for which people are commonly taken to court is sharing child pornography. According to the current system the legal consequence for downloading Madonna’s 99-cent song without her permission is seemingly equated with downloading child pornography.

What is at stake as a result of RIAA’s legal measures is not only the customer’s rights, but the survival of P2P networks. Once in a while, a new technology or innovation crops up that happens to get in the way of profit maximization. While in the past corporations learned to deal with the inventions of VCR and radio and adapt to them, today’s Corporate America is good at finding the quickest way to destroy the roadblock to profits.

Public P2P networks are a valuable innovation for content-sharing without centralization. They mirror the idea behind the Internet: a network without centralization. P2P unfortunately got tangled in Corporate America’s business, and as a result the Internet loses a valuable innovation. We should not be scared of using P2Ps, but instead should use them in a legal way.

The RIAA takes disproportionate and drastic measures for potentially losing $3 to $4 of revenue. RIAA’s real intent, as is evident with p2plawsuits.com, is not to hunt down individuals but to extinguish the P2P networks.

Web-Only Addendum
How to share files with peer-to-peer (p2p) networks safely

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, founded in 1990, is a nonprofit organization that fights for digital rights such as free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights. Its article “How To Not Get Sued for File Sharing,” details steps to safeguard your p2p activities: http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/howto-notgetsued.php

Other universities also provide resources for sharing safely:

University of Chicago: http://security.uchicago.edu/peer-to-peer/no_fileshare.shtml
Duke University: http://www.oit.duke.edu/helpdesk/filesharing/steps.html