Posted on 09/08/2003 10:30:00 AM PDT by Happy2BMe
The Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites) (RIAA) today said it filed lawsuits against 261 people accused of trading copyrighted songs on the Internet. The group also said that it would not sue file sharers who promise in writing not to do it again. The lawsuits, which were filed in federal courts across the country, are the RIAA's latest tactics in its war against the illegal file sharing that record companies blame for plummeting CD sales.
In June, the RIAA promised to sue hundreds of Internet users suspected of illegally trading music using file-swapping services like Kazaa and Morpheus. The association in August clarified that it only would target the most egregious file sharers.
RIAA President Cary Sherman in a teleconference today characterized the people who were sued as "major offenders" who distributed about 1,000 copyrighted music files on average.
The amnesty program, reports of which surfaced last week, would require file sharers to admit in writing that they illegally traded music online and vow in a legally binding, notarized document, never to do it again. The amnesty would not apply to anyone the RIAA already has subpoenaed for information regarding file swapping.
"We're willing to hold out our version of an olive branch," Sherman said.
About 57 million Americans use file-sharing services, according to Boston-based research firm the Yankee Group. Among the most popular are Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster, which rose to prominence after a federal judge shut down the pioneering Napster (news - web sites) service in 2001. Kazaa says that its file sharing software has been downloaded more than 200 million times.
Record companies say file sharing cost the industry more than a billion dollars in lost CD sales between 2000 and 2002. File sharing cost the industry $700 million alone in 2002, according to a report released last week by the Boston-based Forrester research group.
The RIAA has focused most of its efforts on shutting down peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, but a Los Angeles federal judge in an April ruling said that the sites have legal uses and should not be shut down.
The ruling came a day after another federal judge ruled that the RIAA could force Verizon Communications Inc., to hand over the names of two of its high-speed Internet service customers who were illegally trading large amounts of copyrighted music on the Kazaa network.
From: 27 Million Kazaa Users
You gotta be $hittin me!
And the musc, for the most part, is pitiful.
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