A New Strategy Needed to Abate Illegal Music Downloads?
Ars Technica is reporting an interesting development in one of the RIAA file sharing cases that may have ramifications for the future of their strategy of filing hundreds of small lawsuits against individuals alleged to have engaged in illegal music downloading.
The RIAA has for several years now been filing suits against individuals, mostly college students, but identifying IP addresses of alleged illegal downloads, seeking out the owner of the computer at that IP address, and offering settlement terms of usually a few thousand dollars. If the individual fails to take the settlement offer, the RIAA files a lawsuit.
Once a lawsuit is filed, the defendant must file a response with the court. If no response is filed within a specified time, the RIAA has the right to ask for a default judgment, that is, they can get the court say that they “won” and that the defendant owes them the requested money. That’s standard procedure in all types of court cases when a defendant fails to do anything.
In a case in California, however, after the defendant failed to make a response or to contact the court in any way, the court denied the RIAA’s request for a default judgement, saying that the lawsuit they filed did not, on it’s face, give any indication that there was any evidence to show that the defendant might have actually violated copyright law.
The RIAA does have the opportunity to refile the suit and make allegations specific to this particular defendant, so she is not off the hook yet. But this is a significant development because it may mean that the RIAA will have to file these lawsuits with much more attention to each individual situation, rather than the mere boilerplate allegations they have been using. The reason this is significant is because even though the RIAA might actually be able to meet the specificity requirements, it will be much more labor intensive, and therefore more expensive, for them to do so. In cases where they are only asking an average of $3000 in damages to begin with, their strategy may no longer be cost effective, especially when you add in studies that show file sharing and illegal downloading does not seem to be abating at all.
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