A Copyfighter’s Musings

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

What’s surprising to me about these lawsuits is that the RIAA is targetting mothers like Ms. Bassett and senior citizens like Mr. Durwood Pickle. Weren’t they supposed to use the expedited subpoena process to go after “skanky pimple-scarred gangbanger[s]”? If they’re going to sue people indiscriminately without a lot of prior investigation, John Doe suits should work just fine.

I wonder if suing people like Bassett and Pickle is worthwhile. The RIAA can spin it in a “it can happen to anyone” sort of way, rather than a “do you, Sympathetic Possible Future Target, want to end up like this Skanky Pimple-scarred Gangbanger who we’ve just sued?” way. The latter puts off suing Bassetts and Pickles; the former doesn’t and thus could have more drastic consequences.

I suppose they’re choosing the former because, if people already think that file-sharing is wrong (whether done by them or the truly unsympathetic defendants), then all they need is a push in the right direction, reminding them that they aren’t perfectly hidden. But if people don’t think it’s wrong, let alone illegal, then Bassett’s and Pickle’s plight will be seen as sad and unfair, in turn limiting any deterrence effect and greatly expanding the potential for public furor.  (How can you root against a team like Bassett and Pickle? There’s an EFF educational cartoon waiting to come out of that.)

Of course, the RIAA isn’t limiting itself to the first spin tactic. They’re also saying that their battle isn’t solely about music piracy, but also about child pron. This is a new low – more disgusting than suing the four students last year. Sharman Networks is right that this is a horrible, totally undeserved smear campaign. Hiawatha Bray might be right that the P2P network owners are a bit disingenous when they say they don’t know or control or care about what goes on their network (note: Bray focuses on a lack of knowledge, which is not quite accurate – both Streamcast and Grokster admitted to having knowledge). But along with the Sony-style problems with ending the argument there – do the RIAA’s rhetoric and Bray’s logic mean P2P providers now deserve to be called child porn peddlers because they don’t actively regulate how everyone uses their P2P networks? Isn’t that going too far?

What is to separate this argument against P2P from an argument against the Internet as a whole? Not a whole lot. After all, “half the things on the Internet must be illegal.”

Filed by Derek Slater at 1:13 pm under General news
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