The litigation hits keep coming for the Recording Industry Association of America, which sued 24 individuals by name May 24 after finding their identities through a round of so-called John Doe suits – a round compelled when a federal appeals court held Internet service providers don’t have to give up their customers’ names to music business investigators.
The group also sued 493 new suspects, none yet known to them, and reportedly plans to learn their identities through court-issued subpoenas.
“We will continue,” said RIAA president Cary Sherman, announcing the 24 new by-name suits, “to go the extra mile and seek to resolve these cases in a fair and reasonable manner.” The 24 had earlier declined out-of-court settlements with the music trade group, Sherman said.
The RIAA is said to have sued almost 3,000 individuals since September 2003 in its campaign to get people to quit copying song files by way of peer-to-peer networks like KaZaA, Grokster, Morpheus, LimeWire, and others.
In April, the RIAA filed 477 P2P file swappers, including a reported 69 people using university campus networks for their swap activity.
Online music swapping isn’t the only RIAA target these days. Earlier in May, the trade association said seizures of counterfeit and pirate CD-ROMs passed the 5 million mark in 2003, with the RIAA’s own Anti-Piracy Unit seizing a reported 1.4 million illicit such recordings originating from the Latin music market.
“Piracy continues to be a disproportionate problem for the Latin music genre in particular,” said the RIAA’s head of anti-piracy, executive vice president Brad Buckles, after that seizure. “Our investment in new anti-piracy initiatives focusing on Latin music is beginning to pay dividends, but there is more that must be done to address this problem. We are working with law enforcement to bring down major piracy kingpins producing counterfeit product, and targeting areas where illicit music is especially rampant – flea markets, retail outlets and on the street.”
