RIAA sues another 761 file sharers
p2pnet.net News:- Only days after the major movie studios announced they’re following in the music cartel’s footsteps by suing customers, the cartel has launched another 761 subpoenas at p2p file sharers.
This latest ‘action’ pillories students at the American University, Amherst College, Assumption College, Boston College, Boston University, Bridgewater State College, Emerson College, Iowa State University, James Madison University, Mount Holyoke College, Northeastern University, and the University of Massachusetts.
“The lawsuits are an essential educational tool,” says RIAA president Cary Sherman, who with Penn University president Graham Spanier, co-chairs the entertainment industry’s ludicrous Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities.
”They remind music fans about the law and provide incentives to university administrators to offer legal alternatives.”
The ‘legal alternatives’ are music industry backed ’services’ designed to peddle music industry ‘product’ to and through US schools.
The question now is not, When will they sue the next batch of mothers, fathers and their children? - but just how long will the American public allow this shocking travesty to continue?
The Big Four record cartel members use their wholly owned RIAA (Recording Idustry Association of America) as their front to try to sue people into buying ‘product’. But only Warner justifies the ‘America’ part of the enforcement unit’s title. The other three members are Sony-BMG (Japan and Germany), EMI (UK) and UMG (France).
And so far, not one of the now 6,952 ordinary people sued by the music industry behemoth has appeared in court. But this doesn’t stop the multi-billion-dollar industry from implying it’s successfuly sued thousands of people for allegedly infringing music copyrights.
Nor does it stop the mainstream media for repeating the same spurious claims.
The cartel members claim p2p file sharing is causing terrible hardship and that their sue ‘em all war against file sharers is highly effective in stopping it.
In fact, the opposite is true.
“In general we observe that P2P activity has not diminished,” states an important US Academic study. “On the contrary,” it goes on, “P2P traffic represents a significant amount of Internet traffic and is likely to continue to grow in the future RIAA behavior notwithstanding.”
The report, Is P2P dying or just hiding?, was prepared by by CAIDA ( Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis), SDSC (San Diego Supercomputer Center) and the University of California at San Diego and Riverside.
p2pnet was been told the RIAA has tried to shrug it off, claiming the results are based on ‘spoofs‘ rather than actual p2p use.
“The risk tied to Internet file-sharing is almost zero despite entertainment industry claims to the contrary,” says Dr Markus Giesler’s Rethinking Consumer Risk: Cultural Risk, Collective Risk and the Social Construction of Risk Reduction.
No doubt all the universities whose students are being victimized are being offered an opportunity to mimic Penn State by becoming music industry enforcement, marketing and sales units.
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See:-
suing customers - Hollywood sues file sharers, p2pnet, November 17, 2004
spoofs - P2p study flawed says RIAA, p2pnet, October 28, 2004
almost zero - RIAA law suits are failing, p2pnet, November 3, 2004
Penn State - University p2p ‘report’, p2pnet, August 25, 2004
November 19th, 2004 at 4:15 am
These universities had better jump on the bandwagon and force students to pay up for RIAA-approved commercial download services.
It might be ‘protection money’ well spent. Blackmail can be Hell.