RIAA Drops Charges Against Tanya Andersen

This is an interesting story. Tanya Andersen has been one of many lawsuit defendants (read victims) in a campaign by the RIAA to crack down on file sharing networks.

According to Ars Technica and this study, the music industry has been overstating the threat P2P networks pose to music sales. Why would they do this? Of course they want to put forth their image as the helpless victim who needs your help. They want to seem innocent when they sue families with no regard as to whether the information their illegal private investigative searches have found is valid or not.

Mostly, the RIAA has used IP addresses as identifiers to link a person to the supposed infringement. IP addresses have been ruled as insufficient evidence and rightly so. Someone’s computer may have been unwittingly targeted by a P2P Trojan horse. This means that when the user installs a program they get a little extra piece of software with it that forwards P2P data through the victim’s machine. This way, users of the P2P network can surf anonymously and a family who might never use P2P networks in their life may be sued. As well, with wireless networks proliferating and many people not setting a password, their open network can be used by someone else sharing on a P2P network and again they would be identified falsely. For these reasons and many, many more an IP address is not a sufficient identifier of a person’s use of a particular Internet service.

With all of this negative public relations coverage, it’s no wonder some people are switching to the dark side after years of loyal fandom. In one example, the RIAA supposedly sued some family without a computer!

Well here comes the good news: The RIAA has dropped their case with prejudice, allowing the defendant, to seek damages as well as pursue a counter suit such as Suzy Del Cid’s.

As well, it seems the RIAA is even more out of touch than consumers have thought for years. Nettwerk, the Barenaked Ladies, Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and many others have been speaking up against the current state of affairs.

I just hope we come to some kind of happy compromise. I still buy CDs and love browsing the used CD store, but when the RIAA tells me that it is illegal for me to rip those CDs and load them onto my MP3 player for easy enjoyment, that’s just too much. It makes music piracy seem not so bad after all.