Comment Articles

The RIAA will fight on

John Borland CNET News

Published: 23 Dec 2003 10:35 GMT

It's been a three-strikes week for the record industry's campaign against peer-to-peer networks.

On Friday, a Washington, D.C., federal appeals court tossed out a key part of the industry's legal strategy for tracking down and suing music swappers. A day earlier, Holland's supreme court said Kazaa's original owners weren't liable for copyright infringement by people using their software. And last week, Canadian regulators said downloading copyrighted music from peer-to-peer networks -- although not uploading -- was legal in that country.

Is the Recording Industry Association of America no longer in the game? Far from it. In fact, hundreds of lawsuits against individual file-swappers remain open, and more are on the way. But taken together, the decisions represent a step backward for copyright holders' attempts to control unrestricted file swapping on peer-to-peer networks.

Groups such as the RIAA should absolutely have tools to enforce their copyrights online. But the courts aren't giving carte blanche to music pirates. In their campaigns against file-swapping, the recording industry and movie studios have pursued unconventional legal strategies with broad implications for individual privacy, due process and technology policy. Courts are right to push back on issues that should be the focus of a wider societal debate.

In its effort to track down people who are illegally trading music online, the RIAA has tried to take advantage of nearly unprecedented powers allowing a private organisation to issue subpoenas for Internet users' personal information, even before a lawsuit is filed.

That may be simpler and even less intrusive than filing a lawsuit first -- but any time the government asks for such sweeping rights to access personal information, the request is closely scrutinised by courts, policy makers and analysts to prevent abuses of power. If, in fact, Congress means to give subpoena powers to copyright holders, then private-sector companies or organisations should get the same level of scrutiny.

In their attempts to shut down networks like Napster and Kazaa, copyright holders have said technology companies should be held liable for the actions of people using their software. That's also an issue that deserves a public airing outside the context of a copyright-infringement suit, whether in the Netherlands or the United States.