And the beat goes on for the Recording Industry Association of America, which has announced litigation against 754 more people for swapping music over peer-to-peer networks – bringing the total the RIAA has sued to over 7,000.
"With legal online retailers still forced to compete against illegal free networks,” RIAA president Cary Sharman said in a formal statement, “the playing field remains decidedly unbalanced."
That may not be entirely accurate, according to a survey released earlier this month. The Pew Internet & American Life Project said in “Artists, Musicians, and the Internet” that performers from established to starving have not only embraced the Internet as a tool for making and marketing their work but most think that, while unauthorized peer-to-peer file swapping should be illegal, it isn’t the big threat to “creative industries” that the industries themselves think
And P2P use hasn’t slowed despite the RIAA lawsuits, which have now gone on for over a year, with research firm BigChampagne saying an average 7.5 million Netizens logged onto P2P networks in November, up from 4.4 million a year earlier.
The Supreme Court is going to hear a film industry case against Grokster and Morpheus in March. The high court will decide whether lower courts were wrong in ruling that the two P2P networks could not be held liable for copyright infringement because they don’t keep the material in question on their own servers or storage.
The new RIAA litigation targeted students at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Old Dominion University, and Virginia Commonwealth University.
