EFF Report: RIAA legal crusade losing credibility
After five years of legal threats against tens of thousands of American music consumers, the hands of RIAA, the USA recording labels organization, remain empty or barely over: from any standpoint you look at the matter, states the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the majors have lost the bet to reestablish the control on digital contents delivery while succeeding in antagonizing a huge amount of potential customers, pretty happy to not to give a single cent to those viewing them as “pirates” dangerous for business, artists, music and the entire damn world.
It’s a ruthless observation of the facts, the one contained in the report RIAA v. The People: Five Years Later just released by the well-known pro-digital rights organization, that from the complaint against 261 P2P users in September 2003 up to the last developments of the Capitol v. Thomas case analyzes the legal campaign of RIAA on its whole and its practical results, drawing then the proper conclusions.
RIAA has failed in the effort of reaffirming that the exclusive owners of music are the recording labels, the report highlights, the campaign has done nothing but hurt the artists, the fans and the labels themselves and file sharing enjoys, as much and even more than five years ago, a very good health and the unconditional approval of an endless array of users. During all the this time, fighting the unauthorized P2P so hard hasn’t brought a single penny of profit for the industry and the artists.
The evidence collected in the EFF report shows how file sharing use have done nothing but grow, continue to represent one of the main sources of files and contents download for netizens and in some cases it has witnessed the spread of sharing ways more difficult to track, the encrypted or obfuscated protocols, the darknets or even the physical exchange of burned CDs among the users.
What is worse for RIAA the USA courts, the watchdog and academics groups are more and more sceptical about the legitimacy of the theories at the heart of the legal crusade against P2P. The so called theory of “making available”, according to which it would be only needed the availability of audio tracks in the folder of a file sharing client to constitute a copyright infringement felony has lately been stopped several times. The Jammie Thomas case is very significant from this standpoint, because the judge has admitted to have been wrong in advising the jury to consider the “making available” theory as legally effective, ordering a new trial for the woman on whose head was pending a 220.000 dollars fine for a few tracks available in the Kazaa client sharing folder.
“If the RIAA wants to keep suing hundreds of people each month and collecting these huge settlements, it can’t take shortcuts” has stated the EFF attorney Corynne McSherry, strengthening the principle according to which “it’s not enough to say the law ‘could have been’ broken and demand thousands of dollars to make the accusation go away. The recording industry must prove its case and show that infringement actually occurred“.
“More than 30,000 Americans have been targeted for legal action by the recording industry without putting a single penny into the pockets of any artists” has stated the EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann. “At the same time - von Lohmann says - everyone agrees that P2P file-sharing is more popular than ever. The RIAA’s litigation campaign arbitrarily punishes tens of thousands of people for what tens of millions are doing. It’s futile and unfair“.
Von Lohmann then says that “it is high time that the recording industry let fans pay them a reasonable fee for the P2P file sharing that we all know has become a fact of Internet life“. The legal expert refers to the Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing advertised by the EFF as a possible alternative to unauthorized P2P years by now, capable in a single shot of legalizing the sharing now defined as “illegal” or “pirate” and guaranteeing to the majors, and so hopefully to the artists that still use them, an additional incomes source for the steady and inexorable fall of Audio CD sales.
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