The Piracy Crusade by Aram Sinnreich

Author:Aram Sinnreich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: INscribe
Published: 2013-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 9. News incidence of terms promoted by IFPI campaigns, 1999–2011.

Like those of the awareness campaign, the litigation initiative’s measurable short-term successes were easily matched by long-term strategic failures. If calling its own customers criminals had spurred some negative backlash, suing them by the thousands, after explicitly pledging not to do so,32 officially put the music industry at war with the population at large. And like some actual military interventions, this quickly became a classic “quagmire”; even as the evident costs to goodwill mounted, the industry remained far too invested to cease operations and withdraw. The initiative began with a splash, with 261 lawsuits filed against alleged P2P users in September 2003 and the promise that “thousands more” suits would follow if need be.33 The RIAA lived up to its word; five years later, the major labels had sued over 35,000 Americans.34

The badwill associated with the RIAA lawsuits wasn’t simply a matter of freeloaders grousing at the consequences of their own wrongdoing. An unprecedented wave of mass litigation by an industry against its own customers was a pretty ugly story to begin with. Forcing these tens of thousands of defendants to settle for thousands of dollars apiece or face mounting legal costs and the threat of millions of dollars in damages was worse; it was widely (and accurately, in my opinion) perceived as bullying. Failing to compensate musicians for the revenues collected from these suits35 cemented this perception, and undermined the labels’ claims that they were motivated primarily by the desire to “support” their artists. But the greatest blow to the recording industry’s reputation was in its seemingly callous disregard for the lives of its defendants, many of whom were either so clearly innocent, or so severely challenged by circumstance, as to warrant leniency—a consideration they received belatedly, or not at all.

Several publications have examined these cases in far greater detail36 than I can here, so I will simply mention a few notable examples. One of the initial 261 “major offenders” to be sued was Brianna LaHara, a twelve-year-old honors student living in a New York City housing project. Despite her parents’ financial straits, and the fact that her mother had actually paid $29.99 to use the KaZaA P2P service, the RIAA demanded (and received, in less than a day) a $2,000 settlement and a public apology.37 In addition to targeting minors, the industry has also sued the elderly, and even the deceased. In 2005, the RIAA sued an eighty-three-year-old, technologically illiterate woman named Gertrude Walton for allegedly sharing over 700 songs via P2P—a week after it had received a copy of her death certificate from her daughter in response to a warning letter.38 This case was wisely dropped once the press caught wind of it. Similarly, after a P2P defendant named Larry Scantlebury died in the midst of litigation, the RIAA requested that the case be stayed for sixty days “to allow the family additional time to grieve,” then resumed the suit by deposing his children.39 The RIAA has also sued apparently innocent people without even alerting them to the situation.

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