The Recording Industry Association of America has announced that it will be giving up on its controversial strategy to deter internet piracy by suing individual downloaders (some 35,000 of them, including adolescents, single mothers, and dead people) in favor of some other Big Brother type action involving internet service providers.The move was prompted, according to a RIAA spokesperson, by technological advances which will allow the RIAA to report illegal file sharing to ISPs, who will then presumably do something terrible to the downloader.
Whatever. These record companies need to get on board with the fact that their days of unfettered control over the industry came to an end with the general population's access to broadband internet. I would like to have been in the room when the whole lawsuit strategy was first concocted:
old guy 1: We must do something about this interweb downloading thing.
old guy 2: Just sue them. That's what we've always done in the past. How many of these pirates can there be?
old guy 1: This digital music thing is just a fad. If we use a heavy hand these saps will be back in our pockets buying easily damaged and horribly unwieldy compact disks in no time.
old guy 2: Call the lawyers.
So after more than five years of this strategy, which the RIAA refuses to admit as a failure since, according to their numbers, piracy would have been much worse without the lawsuits, we are back to record companies haggling with ISPs over the best way to stem the tide of 'illegal' file sharing. Fantastic. Until these record companies face up to the fact that there will always be piracy on the internet and adjust their business strategies accordingly, they are simply wasting time and money on futile attempts at enforcement of laws that are in a perpetual grey area.
Newrosis does not advocate stealing, nor do we advocate litigation as a means to keep people from stealing. We are Switzerland. We love pirates and record executives equally. Yarrr. Pirates.
