|
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has had some victory against The Pirate Party today by settling with LimeWire (A program to download and share files with others) for a record $105 million dollars. The RIAA has been campaigning on piracy for years now with no real win on their belt. With Anon (A group dedicated to bring groups like the RIAA to its knees) slowing its attacks on the RIAA in recent months, it makes you wonder if these groups are finally gaining some traction on piracy.
In recent years, the recording industry has paid out some astronomical legal costs in fighting similar file sharing programs like Napster, Grokster, Kazaa and Streamcast.
Even though these suits ended mostly successful for the RIAA, industry experts wonder whether the effort has succeeded in slowing down online piracy.
LimeWire said on Thursday it will pay $105 million to settle claims by 13 recording companies that its Peer-to-peer file sharing software was responsible for enabling billions, and potentially even trillions of dollars of damage over the course of the software’s lifecycle.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, which heard the case, last year agreed with the RIAA’s claim that LimeWire and its chairman, Mark Gorton, had enabled music and file sharing to the masses.
The court ordered LimeWise to cease its file sharing operations last October. A jury was in the process of deciding an appropriate penalty when LimeWire made its settlement offer yesterday.
Ray Beckerman, a New York attorney who has defended individuals against RIAA lawsuits said the record labels have reason to feel good. "They got LimeWire shut down, and got some money, But what would be interesting to see is how much of the $105 million that it will get from LimeWire was eaten up by legal fees," he said. "As I see it, the big four record labels have now managed to shut down the big first generation, file sharing" services, he said.
A recent report by The NPD Group, a market researcher, shows that the percentage of people in the U.S. using a P2P file-sharing service to download music has fallen from 16% in the fourth quarter of 2007 to around 9% after LimeWire ceased file sharing operations last fall.
While it is too soon to say if this will help halt illegal file sharing, I can personally say that finding what I want through BitTorrent has been harder latly and I think file sharing is only going to get harder by the day.
In 10 years I would not be surprised that getting certain movies and music will just be impossible to download from free sources. ThePirateBay.org and H33t.com which are just 2 of the BitTorrent file sharing sites out there already are under fire from the RIAA.
The real trick is if the RIAA can get a stream line way of working with the DOJ to pull domain name registration from owners. As recent crackdowns on these torrent sites have recently shown, the path to file sharing can still go both ways. |
Feed Entries