In the face of declining record sales thanks to the popularity of online file-sharing, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). has filed lawsuits against individuals that they believe to be illegally sharing music. Some alumni, such as Zi Mei ’99, are taking a stand against the RIAA, working to defend those targeted by RIAA lawsuits.
In order to find these individuals, the RIAA employs internet bounty hunters and detection companies to monitor p2p networks. When these companies find a user who is sharing music, they report the user’s IP address to the RIAA. However, the RIAA cannot know how those songs got to the user’s shared files folder – via downloading or other means, and legally or not. It is also impossible to tell whether anyone else ever downloaded them from that folder.
Notwithstanding, the RIAA issues a subpoena to the user’s Internet Service Provider (ISP), demanding contact information for the person with the singled-out IP address.
“So far, more than 17,000 people have been sued,” said Mei, who works as a technical consultant at the law firm Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP. “The victims are told to pay a settlement of several thousand dollars, or go through a lengthy and expensive trial. No one person has appeared in court or been found guilty thus far.”
In their strategy, the RIAA assumes that defendants will choose to settle rather than take the recording giants to court. But when defendants do fight back, the RIAA has often been forced to withdraw their lawsuits.
One such defendant was Sarah Ward, an elderly woman from Boston, who was sued for sharing music files.
“The RIAA tried to sue Ward, a grandmother in Boston, for sharing mp3s, among them the song ‘I’m a Thug’ by Trick Daddy,” Mei said. “She owns a Mac, which Kazaa (a p2p service) does not run on.”
When Ward’s lawyer demanded an apology and a dismissal of the lawsuit, the RIAA abandoned its claim.
Mei’s firm is one of those involved in defending against RIAA lawsuits. He began working there after attorney Ray Beckerman, the father of fellow Wesleyan graduate Eli Beckerman ’99, sought Mei out for technical advice.
“My job is to refute the evidence of the plaintiffs on technical grounds,” Mei said. “In the cases I have examined for Mr. Beckerman, the RIAA seems to have deliberately manipulated evidence, or has no claims of any technical merit at all.”
Some cases, such as Atlantic v. Does 1-25 and Elektra v. Barker, may change the way copyright infringement is defined.
“In both cases the RIAA has advanced a startling new argument: that merely making files available is in and of itself a copyright infringement,” Ray Beckerman said. “This flies in the face of many decades of law in which the courts and statute have made it clear that there must be actual physical copying.”
He and his associate Ty Rogers are defending John Doe #8 in the Atlantic v. Does case, as well as Marie Lindor, a home aide worker who does not even own a computer.
Despite how many people have been sued, the RIAA lawsuits do not appear to have discouraged most people from sharing music files. According to Digital Music News, p2p file sharing reached an all-time high in December, with an average simultaneous user level of 6.98 million. This number more than doubles the figure of 2.89 million from September 2003, when lawsuits first began.
On top of this, the RIAA does not seem to be finding many of these 6.89 million users.
“Anyone who wanted to engage in pirating could do it in a way that the RIAA could never catch with their so-called ‘investigation,’” Beckerman said. “How many pirates would use their own Internet access account or would leave the file names of the pirated songs in a shared files folder anyone could access and anyone could trace to their IP address?”
Even as illegally pirated downloads are on the rise, the number of paid-for downloads is increasing. The industry reported 352 million purchased downloads in 2005, which is double the downloads sold in 2004. Nonetheless, the RIAA continues to aggressively pursue illegal mp3 downloads, hoping thereby to encourage people to purchase their music.
“The tactics they have used have helped no one except the RIAA lawyers,” Beckerman said. “The more they do this stuff, the more they’re encouraging their best customers to look to independent labels and artists who market their songs directly.”
The future of the recording industry, according to Beckerman, will favor greater independence on the part of companies and artists as technology makes access to music increasingly easier.
“I think the big recording companies will get smaller, and new and independent companies will get larger, and the recording industry itself will probably shrink as artists are now able to market their music directly through digital files, which people can play in many different media,” Beckerman said. “Also, there are web sites that artists can use to market their music, which do not charge the exorbitant sums that the major recording labels have historically extracted from the artists.”
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