When armed goons come pounding at your door demanding payment to stave off future unspecified “harm,” the law generally calls it extortion. Replace the goons with lawyers armed with briefcases and suddenly we call it intellectual property.
Such is the case with the RIAA, the main lobbying arm of the recording industry whose recent claim to fame over the past several years has been to viciously hunt down anyone guilty of sharing copyrighted music over file sharing networks. Chief among their targets have been college students, who may not have deep pockets, but have ready access to broadband through university networks. Like a schoolyard bully demanding a ransom of milk money, one of the RIAA’s main tactics has been the shakedown enterprise, where offenders (identified only by their IP addresses) are offered the chance to “settle” their case out of court for a nominal fine per offense, usually on the order of a few hundred dollars per song. If the “deal” is refused (if extortion can even be called that), the RIAA ups the ante, strong-arming records out of universities and ISPs, coming back now with a new, far more expensive deal. Should this deal be further refused, the RIAA takes the case directly to court, where the stakes can be staggering.
Consider the recent case of Jammie Thomas, a single mother from Minnesota who earlier this month was found guilty of infringement, the first case of its kind to make it to a verdict. Thomas was ordered to pay $220,000 in damages for sharing a grand total of 24 songs.
In this case as in others, there is no need of actually proving “harm” wrought by file sharing to the recording industry, despite the RIAA’s laughable claims of such. Rather, as was the case with Thomas, they simply need to prove a file is being made available — no one even has to download a file for one to be “guilty” of infringement.
The critical lesson from this is the RIAA’s shakedown tactics work because they are profitable. Few individuals can afford to effectively mount a legal defense, compared to the enormous financial resources at the disposal of the industry. Thus, for a person accused of infringement, the choice is usually simple: ante up with a painful token sum or risk getting taken for everything by teams of professional lawyers in court. Meanwhile, the longer one might choose to hold out, the higher the stakes get — there is no negotiating with a bully, after all.
Fortunately, there are individuals standing up against the RIAA’s petty legal thuggery. The Oct. 19 Technician reported that eight students have contracted with a Greensboro-based legal firm to mount a defense to the RIAA charges. While a bold move, more students need to stand up and fight in order for challenges such as this to be effective.
Meanwhile, the RIAA justifies bullying the weak and powerless on the grounds combating illegal file sharing as a matter of financial survival. Yet this is the same argument the entertainment industry made against the VCR in the 80s, arguing video piracy from personal recorders would spell doom for the industry.
Decades later, the entertainment industry is still alive and well, exposing their case — and the RIAA’s — as nothing but a farce.
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