Music Industry Wins Approval of Subpoenas

[sbp]

Previous thread about this matter.

WASHINGTON - The music industry has issued at least 871 federal subpoenas against computer users this month suspected of illegally sharing music files on the Internet, with roughly 75 new subpoenas being approved each day, U.S. court officials said Friday.

The Recording Industry Association of America has said it expects to file at least several hundred lawsuits seeking financial damages within the next eight weeks. U.S. copyright laws allow for damages of $750 to $150,000 for each song offered illegally on a person's computer, but the RIAA has said it would be open to settlement proposals from defendants.

In some cases, subpoenas cite as few as five songs as "representative recordings" of music files available for downloading from these users. The trade group for the largest music labels, the Washington-based RIAA, previously indicated its lawyers would target Internet users who offer substantial collections of MP3 song files but declined to say how many songs might qualify for a lawsuit.

The RIAA's subpoenas are so prolific that the U.S. District Court in Washington, already suffering staff shortages, has been forced to reassign employees from elsewhere in the clerk's office to help process paperwork, said Angela Caesar-Mobley, the clerk's operations manager.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=s ... ding_music

RIAA

[Tomuchtime]

Thats pretty intresting.Suing someone and getting the claimed judgment are gonna be two diffrent things.I wonder if the RIAA and SCO are sharing the same lawyer pool.
Bill

[BillyGoat]

It will be interesting to see what actually becomes of this- so Im assumming that they download all the music just to prove it is there copyright? IE i could have a file named madonna-pray.mp3, but it could be a song with my sister singing, or not even a song at all, mp3 is after all just a file extention just like all the rest

[Executioner]

I'm sure there will be counter suits filed when they think they nabbed some one that downloaded ton's of mp3's. It's only a matter of time.

On the other end, all it's going to take is some software that is written to avoid detection while on line sharing files.

[FlyingPenguin]

Obviously they hope just the threats will discourage the average non-techie computer user.

Right off the bat you know that anyone with a fat pipe and a lot of users (IE: businesses and universities) will feel compelled to prevent users from file sharing so they won't be liable.

They will almost certainly take some people to court to set a precedent which will scare others.

A lot of people will settle out of court, but the publicity will still scare others.

However, what will be interesting is to see how their case stands up in court when the first one goes to trial.

I would hate to be one of the test cases though....


FOLKS it's only going to get worse. Get ready for it. This is the INFORMATION AGE. Nothing really has any value anymore except information.

They either need to radically alter the way information is copyrighted, or else it WILL be illegal to copy almost anything in the forseeable future.

This is historically equivalent (in a rough way) to early civilization before banking and uniform monetary systems were set up. Anyone could hand someone what looked like a gold coin with an official looking stamp, but there was no way to know for sure if it was pure gold or if it was issued by the government.

Just as new laws and systems had to be invented to support what eventually became the banking system, some radical new laws and systems will need to be invented to deal with information property rights.

Meanwhile things are going to get VERY hairy...

[renovation]

i got a letter from the RIAA some months back and a e-mail to
my luck was with me do !
my cable service was changed from @home to comcast and my ip address was switched that was my saving grace
but it did have me shaking for a bit !
this was over a 1 1/2 ago so i stopped sweating .
not heard any more .
i think i just got lucky do !
and i was on mirc when /how all this came about . not kazaa !! so guys watch your backs thet are for real !