Copyright Law

RIAA Sues Even More File-Sharers

By soulxtc

Targets 3 more in the New York area alone.

I don’t think anybody really bought into the RIAA’s proclamation last December that it had decided to quit suing suspected file-sharers, and the evidence keeps piling up that it’s for good reason.

For I reported this past March about how it filed a copyright infringement case against Shaun Adams in the Federal District Court in Omaha, Nebraska. The RIAA accuses him of illegally ?making available? 9 copyrighted audio files using Limewire back in 2007.

Once again Ray Beckerman of Recording Industry vs the People has done a bit of investigating and found three in just the New York area alone.

“I’ve been receiving reports from around the country of new RIAA cases against individuals being filed,” he says in a blog post. “Just for the heck of it I took a look to see whether the RIAA had filed new cases against individuals in April, in the Eastern District of New York and Southern District of New York. I found 1 in the Southern District, 2 in the Eastern District.”

Now RIAA head Mitch Bainwol has said previously that the RIAA would not initiate any new file-sharing cases, and merely finish those already in progress. The cutoff date was said to have been last August however, and a number of the cases, such as these most recent one, weren?t even filed yet.

So I think it’s safe to say the whole ?no more lawsuits? promise is pretty much meaningless, and belies the letter it sent Congress saying it had “discontinued our broad-based end user litigation program against illegal downloading on peer-to-peer (p2p) networks.”

“We are delighted that circumstances have evolved to the point where we could transition from lawsuits to these ISP graduated response programs,” RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol wrote.

Guess the RIAA’s still in “transition.”

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on May 07, 2009 (boomark / email).