10,306 sued by RIAA
p2pnet.net News:- September 8, 2003, was the date Big Music’s RIAA lodged its first lawsuit against innocent men, women and children it claims are causing awful hardship to its contracted artists and support workers.
It says the damage, and huge losses in sales, are directly attributable to the practice of file sharing. But there’s never been a shred of evidence to prove, or even suggest, that it’s resulted in declines in music industry sales. And subpoenas notwithstanding, no one has ever appeared before a judge.
Nonetheless, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has collected $30 million, or more, from its victims, not one penny of which has gone to the workers and artists the RIAA routinely hoists as excuses for the lawsuits in the first place.
We recently said the number of people victimized by the cartel had burgeoned from 261 to 10,037.
We were wrong.
The correct number as of April 27 is 10,306, says research from Stanford student Waynn Lue, outlined in his Peer-to-Peer Networks and Radio Play: An Unexplored Link.
Not one of the 10,306 has been before a civil court, or has been found guilty of file sharing (which is not, in any case, a crime) or anything else.
And yet the mainstream media continue to parrot music industry propaganda that its RIAA has successfully sued thousands of people.
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See:-
collected $30 million – File sharing, p2p criminals, p2pnet, March 12, 2005
10,037 – 10,037 people sued by RIAA, p2pnet, May 1, 2005
Waynn Lue – P2P and Radio Play, p2pnet, May 16, 2005
May 17th, 2005 at 7:56 pm
“RIAA lodged its first lawsuit against innocent men, women and children it claims ”
So lame…I cant help but laugh.
May 18th, 2005 at 9:09 am
“And yet the mainstream media continue to parrot music industry propaganda that its RIAA has successfully sued thousands of people.”
They’re being successful by one standard at least. a cool $30 million. Heck if i could make money that easy i’d take it.
May 18th, 2005 at 12:11 pm
Well, then, like them, you have no morals.
- Jim
May 18th, 2005 at 3:51 pm
I assume the 30 million figure was arrived at by multiplying the above number of people by the average reported settlement cost. But couldnt the figure be much lower? We read recently that many, perhaps most, of the lawsuits are dismissed or dropped because the information needed to identify the person to be sued doesnt exist anymore by the time the RIAA gets done with their paperwork. How many of these 10k people remained anonymous?
May 18th, 2005 at 4:20 pm
Quite right. The $30 million figure is probably somebody’s back-of-the-envelope calculation of 10,000 x $3000 avg settlement, assuming that everybody settled.
And to call this profitable to the RIAA is ridiculous – I’m sure that their lawyers consume 10 x what they receive in settlements. A standard rule of thumb in business is that calling lawyers into a dispute is Mutually Assured Destruction – meant as a threat of last resort, never to be used by sensible people. The only ones who win are the lawyers.