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RIAA to end its sue the world policy
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 19 December 2008
In a week dominated by the Leonard Cohen classic, can I just say “hallelujah”.
A year that began with the news all four majors had ended their kamikaze love affair with digital rights management, is ending with the news that the Recording Industry Association Of America is axing its other self-defeating, unhelpful, surely-record-company-execs-cant-be-this-dumb policy of suing individual music fans over their use of P2P file sharing technology to acquire or share unlicensed music.
From the word go the RIAA has been at the forefront of the litigious approach to tackling the piracy threat of the internet, which was good news for lawyers, but bad news for pretty much everyone else.
Not least the record companies who had to foot the bill for the legal campaign that was destined to fail from the word go, and which destroyed the already sagging reputation of the record industry at a time when it needed public and consumer support, partly because the labels were clearly going to have to develop direct customer relationships moving forward, and partly because it needed enough goodwill to fight for a re-evaluation of copyright systems.
The original strategy was to sue any company making P2P networking possible. But it soon became clear that suing Napster, Grokster, Kazaa et al was not effective because, even when the US courts eventually started to find in the labels’ favour, the kids had always transferred their loyalties to newer P2P systems by the time older ones had been sued out of business.
The next step was to sue individuals who file shared. Firstly a small handful – to make an example of them, and try and scare file sharers into compliance. When that didn’t work a few more, then a few more, then a few more and then thousands and thousands more until some 35,000 legal letters had been issued.
Yes the vast majority of those targeted settled out of court, but the fines they agreed to pay didn’t cover the cost of pursuing the legal campaign, and certainly didn’t compensate for the bad press whenever cases did go to court. Bad press that escalated as those P2P lawsuits in court hit up this and that legal technicality, making the labels’ case anything but clear-cut. Overall P2P usage was unaffected.
Basically, it was a dumb ass policy that cost lots of money, ruined the record industry’s public reputation and distracted labels from the real priority – developing new business models and working with new internet services to create new revenues.
To their credit, UK record company trade body the BPI never took the ‘sue everything that moves’ approach, using individual fan litigation carefully. It subsequently prioritised lobbying the internet service providers for assistance in combating online piracy, a strategy which, while still in its infancy, has much more promise (providing resulting measures are not too draconian).
According to the Wall Street Journal, the US industry has announced that it too now recognises this is the way forward. The RIAA says it has been winding down its litigation programme since earlier this Autumn, and that it anticipates only taking such action against major filesharers in the future. It’s not clear what this means for the higher profile, long running and still pending legal cases where the accused infringers entered a defence, sometimes with some success.
Confirming the change of strategy, RIAA boss Mitch Bainwol said that he thought the litigation approach had had some success, but that now was the right time to pursue an alternative strategy. He told reporters: “Over the course of five years, the marketplace has changed. Litigation was successful in raising the public’s awareness that file-sharing is illegal, but I now want to try a strategy I think could prove more successful”.
Of course, as I say, the ISP partnership approach is not without its problems, but it has so much more potential than the RIAA’s self-destructive strategy of the last five years I think this story requires as its conclusion another “hallelujah”.
