A conglomeration of ten entertainment industry trade groups, the RIAA and MPAA among them, recently replied to a “Notice of Inquiry” on “Copyright Policy, Creativity, and Innovation in the Internet Economy” sent out by the Dept of Commerce, and in it they admit that their sue-em-all strategy has had mixed results at best.“The lawsuits in which we have engaged have had some positive impacts – they have increased public understanding about the consequences of copyright infringement, acted to deter future infringements, and helped shape consumer decision making about seeking legitimate alternatives for the consumption of music,” reads their reply.
“However, for a number of reasons, the role of lawsuits in solving the online theft problem is clearly limited. For instance, bringing clear-cut claims against major commercial infringers is not by itself a solution in the long run. These cases take years to litigate and are an enormous resource drain.”
It points to the LimeWire case as an example of how lawsuits have failed to really have an impact on illegal file-sharing. It spent 4 years and tens of millions of dollars in legal fees for a verdict that will likely have minimal, if any impact on P2P, especially after developers released LimeWire Pirate Edition that removed the program’s dependency on LimeWire LLC’s servers
“Such massive civil cases do not provide a scalable solution to the full scope of the problem,” it continues.
So what’s their solution? Enacting the controversial Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act so that they can seek to block sites and services accused of copyright infringement at the ISP level since “copyright thieves are adept at jumping across borders and assuming alternate identities to evade the long arm of the law.”
They also believe that “meaningful sanctions” should be taken against “repeat infringers” in order to send a “powerful message” that the practice will no longer be tolerated.
Stay tuned.
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