RIAA Drops Lawsuit Campaign; Asks ISPs to Police Customers

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on December 19, 2008 - 9:50am.

New York - After five years and more than 35,000 copyright infringement lawsuits filed against suspected music file-swappers, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has decided to end its litigation campaign, opting instead to negotiate agreements with Internet service providers to take action against their subscribers, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The RIAA has "hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs" that will take somewhat of a "three-strikes" approach, asking customers to stop file-sharing, and potentially cutting off their Internet access if they fail to comply after multiple notices.

The recording industry has lobbied for similar three-strikes legislation in Europe, but the European Union has so far rejected the notion of banning file-swappers from the Internet as too severe -- while France alone has sided with the record labels and moved to enact such a proposal.

While the RIAA will reportedly not file any new mass batches of lawsuits, it does intend to pursue the ones it still has pending, and reserves the right to file suit against egregious offenders.

Many critics questioned the efficacy of an industry suing its own customers in the first place, and the specific tactics taken by the RIAA in its targeting of defendants; as the Journal notes, the campaign mistakenly targeted "among others, several single mothers, a dead person and a 13-year-old girl."

According to the Journal, the RIAA has been working with New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo on brokering deals with ISPs.

"We wanted to end the litigation," Steven Cohen, Mr. Cuomo's chief of staff, told the Journal. "It's not helpful."

While applauding the end of the mass lawsuit campaign, digital civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation cautioned against the recording industry's new strategy.

"Being added to a nation-wide 'Internet blacklist' -- like that in the pending French legislation -- is a disproportionate punishment, even for those who are 'caught' file sharing," said the EFF's Fred von Lohmann.

"By conservative estimates, 1 in 5 American Internet users is an active file-sharer. Does the recording industry really think that banning 20% of Americans from the Internet is the right answer?"