So check this out… the latest victim of the RIAA is a 12-year old girl living with her single mother in low income housing. I mean, I'm no fan of copyright theft (as someone who deals with it constantly), but suing 12-year olds for hundreds of thousands of dollars seems like a bad strategy… It just seems like a lose/lose scenario.
If I was the RIAA, I'd be more likely to go after the ISPs directly I think. After all, filesharing of this type causes a very specific type of bandwidth spike, and the ISPs would be lying if they didn't know exactly what it was — since it's costing them money. But they also know it's going a long way to selling broadband connections, so they support it — the ISPs are definitely playing a role in helping copyright theft in my opinion. Which is why they're so aggressively playing this “protecting the privacy rights” game. They don't care about that — it's just an excuse to make money. If they cared about privacy and IP rights, they'd say to the RIAA, “give us the trader's IP info and proof of theft, and we'll terminate their account, but we can't tell you who it is.”
After all, using your account to commit federal and international crimes is a violation of pretty much all ISPs' TOS, is it not?
To give another example, sites like Yahoo! Groups have tons of adult “communities”. These subsites are made up almost exclusively of content stolent from legitimate sites and media producers. Yahoo! doesn't charge for them per se, but they do run heavy advertising on them and thereby profit from this theft. Again, it's not as if they don't know exactly what's going on — they just don't care because they're cashing in on it at arm's length.
In order to stop them, you have to go through a lengthy (truly a giant pain in the ass) process to prove to them it's your photo — even if your logo, copyright, and so on is on the picture they demand to see “proof” of ownership and go back and forth with the lawyers in order to squeeze as much money from the theft as possible… Meh. I hope Flynt or someone destroys them one day.
Post a Comment