RIAA wins case in Minnesota?

Originally Posted by SuperNova

What I don't understand is how the RIAA is going to survive just suing people into the ground. It creates nothing but bad press for the industry as a whole. I can guarantee you a lot more people have looked into independent music that isn't under the branches of the top record labels. I know I have.

They're not, that's the funny part. The RIAA is bleeding millions prosecuting all these cases. Their settlements aren't making up the difference, and they generate scads of negative publicity in the process. In fact, they won't see any money from this case either, since that woman is going to have to immediately file for bankruptcy.

Her fault for hiring the stupidest lawyer in the world, though. As I heard it, they even had her MAC address logged, which combined with the IP address is as good as leaving your fingerprints all over the scene of a crime. Someone would have to be directly framing her to have spoofed both numbers. The amount she's being ordered to pay is way outrageous, but she totally deserved to lose the case.

A defense attorney who deserves his law degree would have shot the RIAA out of the water by forcing them to provide proof of damages. The music industry hasn't actually been able to say how much damage has been done by file-sharing, and they go out of their way to white-wash that fact. No damages, no case.

So really, there was plenty of stupid to pass around.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by LeHah

Thats still not wasting any type of money. They're attempting to save their own ass by prosecuting people who are breaking the law. Besides, every CD bought every day puts money in their pockets. I don't see any of this making them broke at any point in the future.

The thing is, it's not really clear that they actually are losing any money due to file-sharing. The RIAA themselves have yet to definitively prove that they're losing any more revenue to Kazaa users than they would from the old CD and cassette tape swapping of the past - the small change piracy that really doesn't matter in the long run.

So the question really is, why are they bothering? If they're not preventing any real revenue loss, and this is costing them so much money, they'd be better off just leaving well enough alone. Millions might not make or break a big company like Sony, but I bet there's some stockholders who'd like to have that in their pockets nonetheless.

It really comes across as the music industry allocating part of their capital for the sole purpose of being colossal dicks, just because they can. Legal right notwithstanding, there's something that seriously needs addressing when you have massive companies going out and completely destroying random middle class families with punitive fines over something that barely affects the companies in the first place.

Nobody should just get away with breaking the law, but this shit with music execs masturbating furiously as they slam yet another family with a $5000settlement claim needs to stop. Any legal system that awards $9250 per song is a broken system.

There's nowhere I can't reach.