From the outside in

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

The #RIAA? Amateurs. Here's how you sue 14,000+ P2P users #extortion

via Ars Technica by nate@arstechnica.com (Nate Anderson) on 6/1/10

The big music labels and movie studios have stepped back from the lawsuit business. The MPAA's abortive campaign against individual file-swappers ended years ago, while the RIAA's more widely publicized (and criticized) years-long campaign against P2P swappers ended over a year ago.

So why have P2P lawsuits against individuals spiked dramatically in 2010? It's all thanks to the US Copyright Group, a set of lawyers who have turned P2P prosecution into revenue generation in order to "SAVE CINEMA." The model couldn't be simpler: find an indie filmmaker; convince the production company to let you sue individual "John Does" for no charge; send out subpoenas to reveal each Doe's identity; demand that each person pay $1,500 to $2,500 to make the lawsuit go away; set up a website to accept checks and credit cards; split the revenue with the filmmaker.

Read the rest of this article...

Read the comments on this post

Posted via email from vtblom's posterous

No comments:

Post a Comment