A few thoughts on the P2P jihad

[vsp]

I'm sure everyone's heard by now that the RIAA is <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31833.html">on a rampage</a>, and has prepared close to a thousand subpoenas for music sharers.

The sheer scale of the user base is at least momentarily comforting. (If every Kazaa user had a square inch of turf, the estimated user base would fill up seven or eight football fields. The RIAA's subpoenas would cover about six square feet inside the first field's one-yard-line, with a half-a-square-foot added each day.) Of course, those odds are a little deceptive; remove non-habitual users, users who don't share files, users who have removed <a href="http://www.riaa.com/about/members/default.asp">RIAA-affiliated artists and labels</a> from shared directories, and those scared off by the legal implications, and there aren't quite as many potential targets any more.

If you happen to hit the Unlucky Lottery and are served with a subpoena, the options aren't promising. The RIAA is clearly hoping that the vast majority will simply say "We'll settle" and fork over cash in four or five figures; that would provide them with lots of "See? The Internet IS full of pirates who are pleading guilty" PR material, save them court costs, and help finance the costs of the legal battles against those who don't cave in. But when you're up against big-corporation lawyers and you're a Joe Average, can you afford the risk of losing your case and being on the hook for a hell of a lot more cash? For that matter, will even the falsely-accused refuse to settle for precisely those reasons?

Realistically, I can't complain much; this is the approach the RIAA should've taken in preference to going after the likes of Napster. Napster was a carrier; users actively provided the infringing material. The viability of RIAA members' business models, copyright infringement vs. theft, the latest in <a href="http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59654,00.html">Howard Berman's</a> string of ridiculous proposed legislation and such are different matters.

But I have two thoughts floating around in my pea-sized cranium:

* Why has Jack Valenti of the MPAA not rushed to a microphone to announce a "me too" lawsuit program? Valenti is a publicity hound, would blow up a station wagon full of nuns if it contained something he considered threatening to the status-quo business model, and has a long history of refusing to be the voice of reason. Considering that P2P serves up movie and television files with great regularity, and that he's crusaded against that before, what's holding the MPAA back?

* Are the RIAA's infringement-hounds leaving no stone unturned in their searches? Are they investigating IRC, FTP, USENET, eDonkey, LimeWire, SoulSeek, WinMX, and other sources of often-musical bandwidth? Are they looking for all kinds of infringement, popular and obscure alike?

Or are they, as some articles have suggested, merely trolling Kazaa each day for familiar names like "Avril Lavigne" and "Michael Jackson" and going after whoever turns up in those searches? (This would be more in character for them.)

Considering that my ISP (Verizon) has been the most directly targetted by the RIAA (a payback for not caving in quickly on the ISP-privacy-rights fight that opened the door for these lawsuits), I'm being very careful about what I put in my shared directories these days...