Despite numerous reports on the ineffectiveness of recent lawsuits, content providers are not giving up yet on their strategy to go after individual P2P users. This past week, less than a month after it filed 750 lawsuits against alleged illegal file-swappers, the RIAA announced the filing of its latest round of lawsuits, this time naming 761 defendants. The announcement came just days after the MPAA decided to join the litigation party by announcing its first round of lawsuits against an unspecified number of alleged P2P users.
Given the recent victory for P2P service distributors in Grokster, the content providers’ resumed focused on individual users should not come as any big surprise. However, the events of the past week are nonetheless interesting, for a few reasons.
The RIAA’s filings contained no real surprises, as they remained consistent with the organization’s strategy of the past year. Their suits continue to highlight users who swap over university networks, though only 25 such users were named in this round. Although the universities, themselves, were not named as defendants in the lawsuits, the identification of their role in the targeted activities is clearly intended by the RIAA to pressure the universities into “coming onboard” in the fight against illegal file-swapping. By naming specific universities, the RIAA is hoping they can increase the incentive for universities to offer their students legal alternatives to P2P.
While the RIAA’s filings were much of the same old story, the MPAA’s announcement was accompanied by a couple of noteworthy points.
The first was that the organization also announced it would soon be releasing free software that would allow parents and other computer users to identify those files on their computers that had been obtained through unauthorized P2P use. The program, which remains unnamed at this point, would not automatically delete these files, but would simply identify them so that users would not unknowingly participate in illegal file-swapping. Not only does this seem like a good idea because it will help those users, typically parents, who really do not want unauthorized files on their computers, but it also seems like a good strategic move by the MPAA because it should impact the viability of ignorance arguments, often employed by defendants in these suits.
Another interesting aspect of the MPAA’s actions was their announcement that the lawsuits are being “accompanied by a series of full-page newspaper advertisements, running in college publications and in mainstream titles including The Wall Street Journal.” This, to me, is a necessary and intelligent move on behalf of the MPAA. If these lawsuits are to prove effective at deterring illegal file-swapping, their publicity must be widespread and, most importantly, it must reach the people who are doing the actual sharing. As I mentioned above, the RIAA’s actions have been criticized as being ineffective at slowing down P2P activity, with many critics pointing to the disparaging ratio between the number of suits the organization can bring and the number of active P2P users (~ 1/1,000). While this ratio is certainly disparaging, and could very well be the reason for the futility of the RIAA’s actions, I believe the cause might be more closely related to the organization’s inability to effectively publicize their actions (seems like a strange thing to say about the people who practically invented publicity). Sure, people heard something about them, and those with a significant interest heard plenty about them, but I don’t believe the typical P2P user (i.e., college student) heard enough about them. For the typical college student, P2P litigation was something he heard about once on the news, then soon forgot about. In fact, most students I talk to aren’t even aware that these lawsuits are continuing to take place (though they are continuing to swap), and if they are, they assume the suits only involve users who swap thousands of files each day. If the content providers made a real conscious effort to increase the awareness of the suits and somehow made users believe they were at risk regardless of how many files they swapped, it would be interesting to see what kind of effect it had P2P activity. Perhaps, none; maybe the ratio really is just too large to make an impact. But until the content industry puts forth a better effort, we will never know, so it’s good to see the MPAA may at least recognize that.
Although these actions by the record and movie industries are not at all surprising, that is not to say that they are well-reasoned. First of all, with cert still pending on Grokster, one would think that maybe the content providers would like to save the attorneys’ fees on these suits by first waiting to see how that case plays out in the Supreme Court. If things end up going their way (something they claim they expect), it would seem they just wasted more time and money throwing rocks and spears in a battle soon to be decided by a nuclear bomb. Then again, taking time to think logically and spending money responsibly are two things the entertainment industry has never really been known for.
Furthermore, what about the possibility of taking all the money that has been spent filing these lawsuits and putting it towards an effort to develop new business models and strategies? Given the reported ineffectiveness of these suits, perhaps it is time to start thinking about the future and move forward with sound reasoning and business savvy, as opposed to spending millions of dollars in an attempt to hold on to the past. Just a thought.
** By the way, the RIAA has now filed 6,952 lawsuits to date, with 1,300 of them ending in out-of-court settlements for an average of $3,000.
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