RIAA's new tactic

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RIAA Enlists ISPs in Digital-Piracy Battle
By Jennifer LeClaire
December 19, 2008 1:21PM

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The RIAA is changing tactics in the battle against music piracy. Now, instead of the RIAA suing consumers -- and generating pubic-relations nightmares -- the RIAA will work with ISPs to alert them to possible pirated music downloads. The RIAA will use the ISP as a piracy enforcer. The RIAA's ISP strategy may help the label industry's viability.

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RIAA
File Sharing
Piracy
ISPs
Music Downloads

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The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is putting an end to its lawsuit strategy, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The RIAA has sued thousands of people over the years for allegedly stealing music on the Internet -- about 35,000 people since 2003 -- but the group is reportedly looking for better ways to protect its members from online piracy.

Analysts said the lawsuit strategy wasn't particularly effective, and caused public-relations issues. Indeed, the RIAA has in the past targeted single mothers, children and even a dead person. The RIAA's new strategy is to enlist Internet service providers.

The ISP as Enforcer

According to the Journal, the RIAA has come to preliminary agreements with major ISPs. The RIAA will send an e-mail alerting an ISP to the suspected music pirate. The ISP, in turn, will send an e-mail to the suspected pirate, suggesting that person is uploading music illegally and asking for a halt.

"The RIAA still wants to discourage piracy, but they want somebody else to be the enforcer," said Phil Leigh, a senior analyst at Inside Digital Media. "This approach will put the ISP in that role."

RIAA's new tactic
In that role, the ISP would continue to alert the alleged infringer about the RIAA's warnings -- to a point. The Journal reported that repeated warnings would be accompanie

d by slower connections to the Internet. The ISP might also unplug the user.

, "Increasingly the ISPs are concerned about bandwidth costs, so they have an incentive to penalize the bandwidth hogs," Leigh said. "High-volume file sharers probably are bandwidth hogs. So the RIAA can essentially identify the egregious violators, and then the ISPs for their own reasons will want to enforce action against them by simply cutting them off."

The RIAA's Bigger Problem

There are more than 500 legitimate digital-music services worldwide, offering more than six million tracks -- more than four times the stock of a music megastore, according to the IFMI, a record industry association in London. Yet tens of billions of illegal files were swapped in 2007. The ratio of unlicensed tracks downloaded to legal tracks sold is about 20 to one.

Will the RIAA's new strategy make a difference? Leigh said it will "make a dent, and nothing more." As he sees it, piracy has become a less significant issue because most consumers are aware of the legal alternatives and the potential consequences of using a pirated site -- not the legal consequences, but the spyware and malware consequences.

But the industry may have bigger problems than battling piracy in the long term, and stopping the lawsuit strategy may be a smart public-relations move.

"At this point, the viability of the label industry itself is in question. It's kind of like newspapers," Leigh said. "One of the things [is] that if that kind of viability is questioned, you certainly don't want to antagonize your audience."