RIAA Starts New Wave of Lawsuits

Keen to keep up the pressure on illegal music swappers, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has launched another wave of lawsuits against illegal music sharers.

So far, the RIAA has launched 2,454 cases since last year, though none of the cases has reached trial stage yet – however, 437 have agreed to pay damages of about US$3000 (€2500) each.

It seems that the RIAA have yet to learn from the bad publicity that accompanied their last lot of legal action: 69 of these new cases are students. Whilst praising colleges for raising awareness of the illegality of copyright infringement, Carly Sherman, president of the RIAA said, “There is also a complementary need for enforcement by copyright owners against the serious offenders to remind people that this activity is illegal.”

The Recording Industry Association of America

Published by

Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?