Early RIAA Efforts: Before Individual Lawsuits

In the early 2000s, the RIAA focused their attention on companies that facilitated file sharing as a means of curbing peer to peer file sharing of music. They targeted Napster in the summer of 2000, winning a landmark case when a federal judge in San Francisco issued an injunction ordering them to shut down their service pending trial.[1] At the time the opinion was released, the decision drew major coverage and was even called “one of the first legal confrontations pitting novel Internet technologies against the rights of intellectual property holders.”[2] Motivated by their recent legal victory, RIAA quickly targeted other companies who facilitate and intend to profit from massive file sharing networks such as Madster (formerly Aimster), StreamCast Networks, Grokster, and Sharman Networks, who most notably sustains Kazaa.[3] The most important aspect to emphasize about these imminent lawsuits is that the defendants are companies, not individual file sharers. In fact, these companies act as intermediaries for sharing music files. An end user can log in to their Napster account, or whatever service provider they choose, and download music from the provider’s servers. What about networks that do not use an intermediary? What about peer-to-peer networks, where the end users share files with each other directly? After the injunction was issued against Napster, it became clear that the RIAA or other copyright holders would have to file against the individuals to try to eradicate peer-to-peer networks. At the time, recording industry spokespeople called that move “highly unlikely”[4] to happen. That was July of 2000.


By the end of the summer of 2002, the vast weight of the entertainment industry began to widen their approach from suing companies to pressuring Congress to enlist the resources of the federal government in curtailing this criminal activity.[5] As I mentioned in my post from June 28, the copyright-holding interested parties in the entertainment industry began lobbying Congress to have the US Dept. of Justice begin to enforce the terms of the 1997 No Electronic Theft Act. Under this law, it is illegal for a person to share copies of copyrighted material with friends and family. If the infringement had a total value of $1,000 or more it was punishable by one year in prison; if the value was over $2,500 it was punishable by up to five years in prisons.[6] Fines up to $250,000 could also be imposed. This legislation was reactionary to the unsuccessful criminal prosecution of David LaMacchia in 1994, and was an attempt to tie up what became known as the Lamacchia Loophole. Copyright law provisions and penalties only applied when the individual made a commercial gain from their endeavors. LaMacchia, at the time a student at MIT, was not commercially-motivated, and even under the more general wire fraud statutes, the criminal charges against him were dismissed.[7] The NET Act allowed for the prosecution of individuals who are engaging in certain non-commercial copyright infringements, dictated by the value of the content being shared. Given the popularity of mass file sharing by this time, if the FBI was going to start cracking down on online music pirates, the implications would be far reaching to say the least. Millions of people engage in file sharing; are all of these people felons? According to then Attorney General John Ashcroft,[8] yes, and the focus shifted from software pirates and companies facilitating file sharing to individuals spreading illegal copies of movies, songs, and other copyrighted materials on peer-to-peer networks.


Besides these new declarations of impending criminal prosecutions, the RIAA continued to attempt to end file sharing practices. Two years after their victory against Napster, RIAA took advantage of a provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that allows them to have a subpoena issued against an Internet Service Provider (ISP) for personal information of an individual subscriber if that person can be singled out as trafficking mass amounts of shared files, evidenced by the amount of files they store on the ISP’s servers. In August of 2002, the RIAA issued a subpoena to Verizon Communications; however, Verizon did not comply and instead questioned their liability because this was the first such subpoena requesting the identity of a peer-to-peer file sharer. Since the shared files were not being stored on their servers, Verizon challenged whether a DMCA subpoena was sufficient legal authority to open their customer’s records.[9] This attempt by the RIAA to extract an individual from the anonymity of the Internet illustrates how they had come to realize that the tide against illegal file sharing would not be turned merely by shutting down Napster and the like. The root of the problem leads back to the folks at home, work, or school who make the files available to the masses in the first place. Therefore a new chapter started when the RIAA began to target Universities as safe havens for unchecked file sharing. In the fall of 2002, RIAA, Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and other smaller trade groups collectively wrote a letter warning university top officials about the large numbers of students that use college resources for illegally sharing and disseminating music, video games, and movie files. The letter went out to more than 2,000 institutions around the country, strongly advising the universities to develop policies, action plans, and effective remedies to bring these activities down.[10]


Were these letters effective in curbing rampant copyright infringement violations??


To be continued…

Sources Consulted:
McCullagh, Declan. 2003. Perspective: The new jailbird jingle. http://news.cnet.com/Perspective-The-new-jailbird-jingle/2010-1071_3-982121.html (Accessed on July 7, 2009).

[1] Barnes, Cecily and John Borland. 2000. Judge issues injunction against Napster. CNET News. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-243698.html (Accessed on July 7, 2009).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Borland, John. 2000. Record labels mull suits against file-traders. CNET News. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-941547.html (Accessed on July 7, 2009).

[4] Barnes, Cecily and John Borland. op cit.

[5] McCullagh, Declan. 2002. File-swapping foes exert P2P pressure. CNET News. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-949533.html (Accessed on July 7, 2009).

[6] Ibid.

[7] Hylton, Jeremy. “Piracy case may set precedent,“ The Tech: Online Edition 114, no. 21 (1994). http://tech.mit.edu/V114/N21/lamacchia.21n.html (Accessed on July 7, 2009).

[8] McCullagh, Declan. 2002. DOJ to swappers: Law’s not on your side. CNET News. http://news.cnet.com/DOJ-to-swappers-Laws-not-on-your-side/2100-1028_3-954591.html (Accessed on July 7, 2009).

[9] McCullagh, Declain. 2002. Music body presses antipiracy case. CNET News. http://news.cnet.com/Music-body-presses-antipiracy-case/2100-1023_3-954658.html?tag=txt (Accessed on July 7, 2009).

[10] Borland, John. 2002. Hollywood chases down campus pirates. CNET News. http://news.cnet.com/Hollywood-chases-down-campus-pirates/2100-1023_3-961637.html (Accessed on July 7, 2009).