RIAA Victimizes Students?

Agents of the RIAA – the ‘Big 4 cartel’ of EMI, Vivendi, Sony BMG and Warner Music – have been harrassing students, their colleges, and mothers in their apparent attempts to sue everyone in the US. The RIAA’s ‘investigators’ – professionals who “monitor peer-to-peer systems[like ares] to gather evidence that can be used in a lawsuit” have sent out around 3,000 letters containing notices of pre-litigation. What this means, allegedly, is that students at the colleges identified get the chance to call RIAA and ‘negotiate a settlement’. Because of course students have they financial clout to settle out of court with a group of huge multinational organizations… hmmm.

In a recent story in the Boston Globe (as reported on p2pnet.net, seven Maine college students and a mother from nearby Biddeford have been sent ‘pre-litivgation’ documents designed to allow the students (and the mother) to incriminate themselves. The letters offer settlements at prices upwards of some $3,000 in return for the promise of no court action. The ‘perpetrators’ have 20 days to respond.

We see some flaws in this approach, not least of which is the fact that $3,000 to companies the likes of which make up the RIAA is simply peanuts. It’s a drop in the ocean compared to the millions or billions of dollars in losses they claim to be suffering.

The suing process is simple – and it needs to be, with an estimated 30,000 RIAA attempts at cases to date – find a perpetrator, file a lawsuit against the P2P network, extort the user, file a lawsuit against the individual, wash, rinse and repeat.

Easy money? Probably not. We estimate that it’s costing more in bringing these cases to the courts than it’s making the RIAA back. Clearly that isn’t the main objective, then, which is more likely to be simple and honest scare-mongering.

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