RIAA: It's not nice to share

Few people would dispute the notion that freely sharing copyright-protected digital music files is unethical and, yes, downright illegal. But that doesn’t excuse the kind of tactics being used by the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) to stem the practice – intimidation, online data mining and threats of massive fines, often against teenagers who shared a few files without thinking it through. The RIAA has gone after about 30,000 Americans so far, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sending “pre-litigation settlement letters” to extract a few thousand dollars from each accused file-sharer, usually a teenager or college kid. Even if you’re innocent, defending against a suit could cost way more than the “settlement,” so nearly everybody pays up. A single mother of two in Minnesota who refused to settle was the first person in America taken to court, where a jury in October socked her with a $222,000 penalty for sharing 24 songs.

The industry's focus has been on college campuses, those hotbeds of file-sharing, where it has coerced school administrations into turning in students whose computers it claimed were doing the dirty deed. Ohio University, targeted by the RIAA early this year, even overreacted by banning all peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing, even though most of it is legal – not to mention vital to many academic pursuits these days.

But finally, somebody with some legal muscle is fighting back. Last month, the University of Oregon said it would fight an RIAA subpoena demanding it release the identities of 17 students RIAA accuses of file-sharing. Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers last week joined in, saying RIAA investigative tactics may be illegal – including alleged uploading of individuals’ credit card numbers and other personal information from their computers – and argues that the firm it hired to do its dirty work isn’t even licensed in Oregon.

RIAA’s effort is needless nonsense, not to mention awful PR for the recording industry, because it isn’t really being hurt financially by file-sharing. A study by economists from Harvard and University of Kansas concludes that sharing has “an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero.” What the industry should be doing is figuring out ways to use this kind of technology to its advantage.

Myers’ office said in a brief that while copyright holders certainly have the right to pursue cases of infringement, that pursuit should “be tempered by basic notions of privacy and due process.”
Privacy and due process. What radical concepts. Maybe if somebody sets them to music, the folks at RIAA could remember them.