The Recording Industry Association of America's subpoena campaign against peer-to-peer music file swapping took a big enough hit December 19, when a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the music industry trade group cannot subpoena Internet service providers to give up their subscriber names.
By ruling that the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act "betrays no awareness whatsoever that Internet users might be able directly to exchange files containing copyrighted works," the panel's ruling may have left in doubt about 382 civil lawsuits filed over the past six months.
The three-judge panel held that, while they agreed with the recording industry that there were big stakes involved with Internet music swapping, the courts' business was not to rewrite the DMCA "no matter how damaging P2P has been to the music industry or threatens being to the motion picture and software industries."
The RIAA has tried to force Verizon Online and other Internet service providers to give up the names of subscribers the music industry suspects of downloading and swapping files of copyrighted music. They began a campaign of subpoenas and lawsuits six months ago, sometimes with embarrassing results, such as one case of mistaken identity and the other in which they sued a grandparent who didn't know their grandchild was downloading music on the home computer.
Titan Media general counsel Gill Sperlein – whose company is involved in the P2P issue, by way of trying to stop online swapping of its gay adult video materials, and who have worked quietly with ISPs to bring subscribers to account without betraying subscriber privacy, a key issue in other P2P court battles – was unavailable for comment before this story went to press.
Sperlein and Titan have said in the past their concern is not just stopping copyright piracy but keeping children from viewing adult materials inadvertently, as some P2P critics believe happens frequently enough when children download files from popular P2P networks.
