AfterDawn: News

Supreme Court rejects RIAA appeal

The RIAA has been running a campaign against online music filesharing now for over a year. The RIAA were using a 1998 law to force ISP's to hand over subscriber information on individuals suspected of sharing copyrighted music through P2P networks. Verizon challenged this saying that the RIAA needed to file a formal lawsuit to get customer information and a U.S. appeals court agreed. It ruled that the RIAA must first launch an anonymous "John Doe" lawsuit in order to get customer details.

The U.S. Supreme Court today rejected an appeal by the RIAA without giving any comment on it. It is likely that this will not affect the RIAA's action on illegal filesharing as they have sued more than 3000 P2P users since the appeals court ruling. The sad fact is that the RIAA are not alone now. The IFPI has also begun suing European P2P users, claiming they have done everything they can without legal action to try to deter filesharing. That is very strange as I have not seen even one ad on TV or anything about filesharing, except for Sky News reporting on the lawsuits and a Discovery documentary on movie downloading. It just appears that the recording industry is very quick to the trigger when they see another problem that is going to destroy the music industry, like the recording songs from the radio epidemic, if you can remember it.



Source:
News.com

Written by: James Delahunty @ 12 Oct 2004 10:49

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• 5 comments

• RedAnt

  RIAA Sucks!
  They are a blight on humanity.

  12.10.2004 12:19 #1

• max777

  I'll never buy a CD or DVD again for the rest of my life. Ok maybe rent DVD's. But the RIAA sues you based on an IP address. You're choice is to settle and pay $5000 to $15,000 (based on your income), whether you did it or not. Or pay millions for a lawyer and attempt to fight for 6 years of your life.

  13.10.2004 02:56 #2

• rroettger

  I really like all the new unlimited DVD rentals for $10 or 20 per month. I rented 102 movies last month. Could have done better but I was working too much.
  

  
  DELL Dimension 8300 XP Pro SP2
  Pentium 4 3.2GHz HT 1GB DDR SDRAM
  2x160GB RAID 0 SATA HDD
  16xDVD-ROM 8xDVD DL+R/+R/+RW
  19" LCD. Dolby 5.1

  13.10.2004 03:42 #3

• yunoa

  I am new here so plz can i ask a question about this RIAA. I read the new and look like they are attacking a lot of people who using p2p network. So but why these people were attacked. IF there are a lot people using p2p network, how can they just attack some of them. I make sure that they can easy trace the other. May be these people do something that make they have to attack or something. Well so should we use p2p network or not.

  13.10.2004 13:56 #4

• OzMick

  Holy crap rroettger, 102 movies is an effort and a half. Just imagine what you could have done if you weren't working? Man, my best sustained effort was about 30 a month, but uni has been too full on lately to keep that up. But I'll graduate in two weeks time, so Blockbuster had better watch out... Someone is going to be watching far more Star Trek than is classified healthy...

  13.10.2004 20:15 #5