US Recording Industry goes on the legal attack

Posted on 1 Oct 2004 at 12:53

A US recording industry organisation has launched a further 762 law suits against users of file-sharing networks suspected of trading copyright material.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced the suits yesterday. Although the actual identities of those sued are not known, it is expected that ISPs will be asked to hand over identifying information for IP addresses that the RIAA believes have been used to swap copyright files.

A number of these IP addresses are believed to belong to students at 26 colleges and universities across the US.

'We want music fans to enjoy music online, but in a fashion that compensates everyone who worked to create that music,' RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement yesterday.

Students are particularly prone to using peer-to-peer systems to build up their music collections because with many campuses having high-speed networks, and students having little spare money to lavish on music, a file-sharing network makes a lot of sense.

Particularly when, according to Dr Markus Giesler, assistant professor of marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, those indulging in the practice believe the chances of being caught are negligible.

While the RIAA's legal efforts have resulted in nearly five and a half thousand suits against users of peer-to-peer networks so far this year, Giesler's Theory of Collective Consumer Risk study states: '[file-sharing] consumers perceive and communicate the risk involved in the consumption of [file-sharing] to be equally distributed among those [file-sharing] consumers that are currently present in [that file-sharing network's] cybercultural sphere and that, as a result, ... consumers are less likely to expect unpleasant outcomes or events ... the more consumers are present.'

Author: Matt Whipp