DeWitt Clinton

In a refreshing bit of news seen at Slashdot, Internet.com is running an article about how Internet Service Providers are now ignoring the Recording Industry Association of America’s requests to voluntarily cooperate in targeting individual users. The RIAA’s tactic last year involved getting a court clerk to sign a subpoena order to force ISPs to turn over the names of individuals suspected of trading copyrighted material. The RIAA would then contact the individual directly, threatening them with a lawsuit and immediately offering to settle out of court to avoid the bad publicity of a trial. However, a court ruling at the end of 2003 declared the practice illegal and put a temporary stop to this tactic. Even members of Congress weighed in against the RIAA’s abuse of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The RIAA responded by saying that they would now simply skip the step of contacting the individual, and instead immediately sue them as soon as they were identified as a presumable file-trader. After asking ISPs such as Verizon to notify their customers on the RIAA’s behalf, not one single company has agreed to comply. While the ISPs may even be sympathetic to the RIAA’s goals, too many bridges may have been burned in the past between the two parties for the ISPs to trust the RIAA enough to cooperate. To this Breakdown simply adds, when all of your former friends turn against you, maybe they have a point about something.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2004 by DeWitt Clinton and is filed under breakdown. You can bookmark this post at delicious. You can digg this post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.