Review of the battle between the recording industry and file-sharing

In this blog, i'll do a review over the ongoing battle between the recording industry and "file-sharing", including both file-sharing clients/networks and file-sharers. File-sharing, since the birth of Napster has been great example of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) success. Clients such as LimeWire, Kazaa, Bittorrent and many other variations allow users to join the corresponding networks and freely share their files to and downloads files from other users. From an user's perspective, that's great. But the recording industry doesn't think so.
Who are they ?
1. Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) inclues Sony BMG, EMI, Universal Music and Waner, and often refered to as the Big-Four. They are in charge of administrating music recording, distribution and god-know-what stuff relating to music. In this context, we are only concerned about their battles against music piracy, in which P2P file-sharing is the scapegoat.
2. British Phonographic Industry (BPI) UK counterpart of the RIAA, with similar tasks of administrating the music industry; and unsuprisingly the same battles agains P2P file-sharing (with the same tatics).
3. International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) Organization similar to BPI and RIAA, but operates in international scale with at least 45 participants countries. Based in UK.

Making enemies with file-sharing networks
Here are the two main milestones:
* 1999 - Napster sued by RIAA, who who accused Napster of facilitating illegal trading of copyrighted music. Napster argued that it only provided indexing service, but not actually stored any copyrighted materials in the servers. However, RIAA said they were suing over its control, not damage. In 2002, Napster was shutdown, then taken over by another company that now provide legal music downloading service.
* Kazaa has been brought to court over copyright infringement since 2001. And if you read the newspaper in 1-11-2006, Kazaa had agree to pay the IFPI over $100m settlement for the lawsuit. The music industry was thrilled, many file-sharers felt disgusted.

RIAA vs the People (in favor of the people)
1. Who get sued? Any American who is classified as "heavy uploader", i.e.: sharing thousands of copyrighted in the network (of course without permission of the copyright owner), allowing millions of users to get a copy of them within minutes of downloading.
2. How do they find out? RIAA people would use the same P2P clients as a normal user would, then perform searches for copyrighted music (with song title or keywork searching). For each search, they will have a list of IP addresses that upload the song. By doing quite many searches like that, they can find out which IP address is the "heavy uploader".
RIAA can now file lawsuits against these users, and ask the judge for an "immediate discovery" warrant, and use that to send subpoena to ISP, asking to reveal user's account information based on the IP address. In theory, any ISP can fight back and resist from giving out this information, but in practice none of them would, due to time and budget needed to pursue.
3. How much do they ask for? $750 per song (compared to 99p for a song from iTunes, that is really a rip off). Consider the fact the most people who get sued are heavy uploader (must be several hunderds songs), they may have to pay hunderds of thousands dollars.
4. Second chance? Yes, they are "nice" enough to offer settlement deals. Give me several thousands dollar and i make everything goes away. Given that the only evidence that the RIAA had at the time were screenshots of results from searching for the files, and the list of files that you allegedly uploaded; anyone who could hire a good lawyer can file a countersuit against RIAA. However, almost all choose to pay the settlement, because of legal fee for pursuing the case would be much higher, and RIAA has enough money (funded by the Big Four) to hire the best lawyer around, which makes the chance to win against them even lower.

From above, we can see how RIAA abuse/exploit the court system to push their own customers over edge. It forces ISP to reveal user's account information and users to pay settlement, all because they don't have the time and the money to countersue. Furthermore, the settlement money is then used to file even more lawsuits.

5. RIAA's shames
There have been people who stand up, and in most cases bring shames to the RIAA, as they are exposed to the public. These cases have shown the RIAA's tactic, which is "to sue everyone".
* Kids - 12 year-old girl Briana Lahana, an hornour student was accused of sharing copyrighted music with Kazaa. Because of her "naive" though that she could download at will, her mother had to pay the settlement for thousands of dollar. The register made fun of RIAA here. The more famous case is the one against Brittany Chan. Her parents were originally sued by the RIAA, but they resisted as RIAA could not give any convincing evidence. It then turned to sue Brittany (13 year-old girl), but subsequently withdrew, because the judge asked it to pay legal fee and guardian for the girl.
* Parents - so many cases that parents (who are internet illiterate) have to pay settlement for their children. The most recent case involved Patricia Santangelo paying upto $7,500.
* Grandmother and elderly people - a 66 year-old woman sued for trading Rap and hiphop music with Kazaa. Beside the fact that none of the old people i know listens to that kind of music, RIAA later dropped the case, because (a) she never did such thing, (b) she owns a Mac at that time, which can not install and run Kazaa.
* Student - RIAA seems to aim at students a lot, firstly because they are more likely to share music over P2P network than anyone else. And secondly, they always pay the settlement. Students never have enough money to pay for all the legal fee to pursue the case against them. In April 2006, however, a paper in MIT publish an outrageous article from Cassi Hunt, who claimed that RIAA stated that it "has been known to suggest students to drop out of college or go to community college in order to afford their settlement".
* Dead people - RIAA decided to sue a 83-year-old woman of sharing copyrighted music online. However, she had no interest in computer and insisted in not having any computer at home. Plus, she had passed away months ago.
* Computer-less people - the oddest case was the one against a computer-less home owners, who were all at awe, saying "I don't understand this, How can they sue us when we don't even have a computer"

BPI vs the people
Accoss the pond, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is doing the same thing as its American counterpart RIAA is. The only difference here is that BPI has full support from the media. We don't see many articles making fun of the BPI or criticising its tatics.
The BPI's individula targets are:
1. Kids - like in the US, many parents have to pay settlement for their children music-trading activities. In August 2005, Sylvia, mother of Emily Price (a 14-year-old girl) paid £2,500 settlement, while accusing the BPI of not having warned them first.
2. Other users - there have been 139 lawsuits against individuals since October 2004 , most of them settle in for up to £6,500. Two men who were accused of uploading more than 8,000 songs (together with other 3 users) refused to pay the settlement and went to court. However, the judge ruled against them; both have to pay an immediate £2,000; plus much more in legal fee to come.

The BPI also targets international file-sharing website. It even urged the goverment to ask the Russia to shut down allofmp3.com website at the G8 summit.
In July 2006, BPI proposed a new tatics against illegal file-sharers, by forcing the ISP to "pull the plug", i.e. freezing accounts of users they thought were heavily involved in sharing copyrighted music. The BPI had requested Tiscalli and Cable & Wireless ISP to suspend 56 accounts. There were resistence from these two ISPs, but they would seem to give in.