I’ve seen a couple of posts in mainstream outlets over the past few days, discussing the lawsuits and “settlement offers” that the music industry is using to extort money from their erstwhile customers. This story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is a fairly even-handed account, and does a better job than most of addressing the deeper issue of these lawsuits:
Recording industry representatives say the corporations are only exercising their legal right to protect against theft. But the industry threats have drawn complaints that the companies are using the expense and complexity of the federal court system to bully people.
“Copyright infringement is wrong, but abuse of innocent people is wrong too,” said Lory Lybeck, a Mercer Island attorney who has several clients accused of copyright infringement. “There’s a predominance of (these lawsuits) filed against people who simply can’t participate in the federal legal system.”
This is the problem, in a nutshell. Even if you’re innocent, it might be cheaper for you to pay the fine than it is to defend your good name- and that’s clearly a failure of the way our society is set up to resolve this kind of dispute. We have an adversarial legal system, but the only way the system can produce a fair outcome is if both sides can afford to put up a fight.
The PI should have placed more emphasis on the outcome of cases like Capitol v. Foster, where the RIAA was ordered to pay over $100,000 in attorney’s fees as a penalty for suing the wrong person. If more victims of the RIAA’s extortion attempts knew that they could clear their name and force their wrongful accusers to pay their legal bills, perhaps more people would be willing to defend their innocence instead of paying to make the problem go away.
Perhaps more troubling are the stories about the RIAA using the IT services at college campuses to rat out students. It’s not immediately clear to me why any university would agree to participate in extorting “settlement” from their students, but it does seem like this kind of failure on the part of the university to defend its students would be a good reason to avoid going to school there.
