If your summer employment involved some sort of sensory deprivation or you were recently rescued from the bottom of a well by a group of big-hearted townsfolk, you may have missed the latest updates in the Record Association Industry of America's campaign against the file-sharers of the United States. So to keep you up to date on all the latest capers and to offer a layman's assessment of what risks there are for all you \pirates"" (their word, not mine), here is the first half of a two-part guide to the nooks and crannies of the big music labels' anti-file-sharing drive.
Although the campaign against illegal downloading stretches back to the turn of the millennium with the battle of the record industry and an apparently impoverished Metallica against ""person-to-person"" service Napster, the more controversial and frightening practice of taking legal action against individual downloaders dates back only to 2003. Things could quickly have gone from bad to worse for file-sharers, but a landmark appeals court ruling at that time forced the RIAA to file separate anonymous suits against each individual they sought damages from rather than permitting them to take hundreds or thousands (or millions) to court at once with a single suit.
This decision, a godsend to users of Kazaa and the like, made it unfeasible for the RIAA to sue all of the country's millions of downloaders and led the record companies to instead pursue a strategy of deterrence (kind of like the death penalty, but for cash-strapped Dave Matthews fans instead of murderers) which continues to this day.
The problem for Big Polycarbonate Disc: Suing thousands of people individually is a tough job, even with the combined might of the major record labels. That would certainly explain how the association has managed to send subpoenas to a few questionable offenders, including a 12-year-old, several elderly people without computers, and most puzzling of all, a dead woman (who was, for the record, a huge fan of Wham!). But minor setbacks like suing the deceased don't matter much when you're waging a scare campaign and almost every person served, including the 12-year-old, has agreed to settle out of court. This is all despite the fact that, according to many legal professionals, the RIAA's case is not particularly strong.
In fact, as no case has yet actually made it to court, a trial could go any direction. The RIAA would have to navigate the uncertain legal waters of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the almost weekly court decisions setting contradictory precedents for how such laws must be evaluated. There's also the fact that ""piracy,"" the industry's favorite charge to throw around these days, means approximately, ""To profit from the sale of something to which you do not own the copyright."" Convicting a bunch of music fans who've never earned a dollar would take a rather loose interpretation of the term.
Still, it's no surprise that until recently, no one has bothered to test the RIAA's mettle-paying several thousand in a settlement sounds a lot better than personally taking on four of the world's largest companies in court, which is a lot like bringing a Nerf bat to a knife fight.
When White Plains, NY mother Patricia Santangelo (bigger hero on the internet than Gunther and the ""Numa Numa"" guy combined) has her day in court, she will be the first person in the world to do so. The argument in her defense? The offending downloads were made by one of her children's friends, for whom she is not legally responsible. But will that rationale and the moral support of millions of computer users with unpaid-for copies of that one New Radicals song be enough to fight the cadre of lawyers and rumored robot soldiers at the RIAA's disposal? We pirates can only hope so.
Come back next week for a look at how the file-sharing lawsuits relate more closely to college students in particular.
Matt Hunziker is a sophomore majoring in political science and english. His column runs every Thursday.
