The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a business organization that gives support and upholds innovative and fiscal vivacity of the music corporations. The affiliates of this organization include the most vivacious music brand names around the world while the role of the members of RIAA is to generate, produce and sell about three quarters of all the legally documented music that is manufactured within the US (RIAA para.2). The RIAA’s mandate is therefore to guard scholarly possessions as dictated by the initial amendment rights of musicians and music brand names and it also caries out both technological and market researches for their members. Apart from that, the RIAA also holds the mandate to endorse Gold, PlatinumTM, Los De Oro y PLatinoTM, Multi-Platinum and the Diamond sales awards (RIAA para. 2).
The music industry and the media organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Association of America strive to prevent piracy through file sharing. These organizations specifically aim at nabbing the music files shared using the internet via the peer to peer computer program (Electronic Frontier Foundation para. 1). According to RIAA, this kind of file sharing through peer to peer leads to loss of billions of money yearly and a s a result causing a great loss to the buyers, recording brand names, traders and the musicians as well. The RIAA therefore has been filing a number of law suits against organizations and individuals found to be involved in patent breach. According the RIAA chairperson, Cary Sherman, the large numbers of law suits filed in the courts have to some extent brought this vice under control (Electronic Frontier Foundation para. 2).
The RIAA has been filing a number of charges against organizations and individuals especially students linked to copyright infringement through file sharing. At the close of 2008, RIAA Had declared their decision to stop suing for piracy and instead partner with the ISPs who will cut the internet connection of the individual or organization participating in copyright infringement; that is, if they fail to heed to the warning against distributing copyrighted works (Bennet 8). However, this has not really been successful since no ISP has really declared their support for this; Verizon, in particular, has declared their opposition to this proposal (McBride and Smith para. 1).
The RIAA will therefore be obliged to depend on the information given by the ISPs in filing the lawsuits against the individuals. The feasibility of this strategy is unknown. According to Eric Garland, president of Big Champagne LLC which is a firm based on patent breach consultation; there is no authentic strategy for fighting piracy (McBride and Smith para. 2). Quite a number of people were seriously opposed to RIAA charges against individuals and organizations, for instance, Brian Toder the head of the Minnesota mother which is an organization dealing in file sharing was quoted saying that that it was a good move to have the RIAA stop the law suit which according to him was very vicious. In line with this, the New York State Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, started negotiating an accord between the RIAA and the ISPs (McBride and Smith para. 3) so as to help handle the piracy cases, according to him; this was a better approach than legal action which he considered unhelpful.
The RIAA believes that this new strategy will work since it can reach a larger audience and again it is a restraint in itself against patent breach. According to RIAA chairperson, the importance of this strategy is that alerts the individuals that their activities are not secret. He is also in support of the litigation strategy which he asserts was crucial in notifying the public that copyright infringement is illegal despite failing to completely curb piracy. The RIAA alleges that there has been a great decline in the music sales and this is as a result of illegal file downloads and sharing over the internet.
Once the ISP has identified the individual involved in file sharing, the RIAA will make the individual to pay a specified a mount to it and to pledge not to ever indulge in file sharing again. The individual is also made to make a payment of about seven hundred and fifty dollars for each of the works that they downloaded as damage fee, the RIAA will have to select only those downloads that they feel deserve payment. The amount of fee to be paid for the damages is normally determined by the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 that set between 750 dollars to 30,000 dollars per piece of work (McBride and Smith para.3), but if the individual is headstrong then the amount could be increased up to about 150,000 dollars. Some of the significant lawsuits by RIAA were against Joel Tenenbaum in which the judges ruled that he should pay RIAA a total sum of 675,000 dollars and that of Jasmine Thomas Rasset in which the jury ruled that he should pay a sum of 1.92 million dollars, though this amount was later reduced by the court to about 54, 000 dollars. Even though this method, to some extent, worked for RIAA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, The public Citizen and the American Civil Liberties Union are opposed to this authority given to RIAA to expose the identity of the internet users without them being allowed to subvert the ruling in court.
In 2007, the RIAA started sending memos to those people that it had found to be involved in sharing music files over the internet; these notes also directed the recipients to the P2Plawsuits.com website where they could pay for the works they had downloaded using credit cards. RIAA realized that most of the collection it made from the settlement went into sorting out the legal issues, thereby leaving it with very minimal income, and as a result they came up with P2Plawsuits.com website. The RIAA therefore engaged in sending notes to ISPs and the educational institutions asking them to handover the notes to the learners in order for them to make these payments. The RIAA also asked ISPS to preserve the confirmation since it was important to validate the settlements made by the students.
Apart from the P2P lawsuits, RIAA, in 1998 sued the Diamond Multimedia RIO PMP300 music player on the grounds that it went against the audio recording act of 1992 (Pillsbury 155). At this time, the company was noteworthy because it was the second company to produce a handy MP3 player. However, the RIAA lost the case as the jury ruled in favor of the Diamond Multimedia RIO PMP300 and this led to an increased demand for this portable MP3 player.
The RIAA in 2003 sued the college students who invented the LAN searching tools claiming that it was a complicated network aimed at promoting piracy of music. In that same year, the RIAA sued a number of people who distributed a lot of materials on a website called Kazaa and many of these individuals were forced to settle the cases through payments of about three thousand. Even though, the web site also countersued the RIAA claiming that it used illegal means to gain access to the users files. In 2006, the RIAA also filed another case against XM satellite Radio in order to instruct it against allowing its users from playing the music that they had recorded through the satellite devices. In addition to this, it also sued a number of the radio stations on the internet. RIAA lost another case against ALLOMP3.com which is based in Russia as the court in Moscow ruled in favor of the ALLOMP3.com.
In a rather unexpected turn of events, RIAA was sued on the grounds that it was using unlawful and faulty procedures to investigate on those who could be downloading or sharing copyrighted materials illegally, this lawsuit was based on the Computer Fraud and Abuse and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Acts (Triplett para.2). The petitioner in the case was Tanya Anderson; she sued RIAA for using illegal and defective techniques to collect information that it used to file the law suits against individuals (Triplett para. 3). Tanya was suing the RIAA because it had offered her a notice in 2005 informing her to make a settlement for distributing over one thousand files, but after the courts order to have her machine inspected, the RIAA failed to find any evidence for breach of copyright. Her lawyer, Lory Lybeck, was advocated for a class-action against RIAA on the grounds that several innocent people were being forced to pay fines for crimes they did not commit (Triplett para. 4).
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a business organization that gives supports and uploads innovative and fiscal vivacity of the music corporations. An analysis done showed that copyright infringement results in a lot of lose for the international music industry. Apart from that, it leads to losses of jobs by individuals, revenue by workers as a well as losses in tax income by the governments. In line with this, the New York State Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo started negotiating an accord between the RIAA and the ISPs so as to help handle the piracy cases, according to him; this was a better approach than legal action. RIAA has been suing a number of people that have been discovered to be involved in piracy and making them pay large sums of money for the damages. It also plans to liaise with the colleges and universities to discourage piracy among the students.
Works Cited
Bennet, John Jr. The Digital Umbrella: Technology’s Attack on Personal Privacy in America. NY, Brown Walker Press. 2004.
Electronic Frontier Foundation. “RIAA v. The People.” RIAA v. The People. 2008. Web.
McBride, Sarah and Smith, Ethan. “Music Industry to Abandon Mass Suits.” Music Industry to Abandon Mass Suits. 2008. Web.
Pillsbury, Glenn T. Damage incorporated: Metallica and the production of musical identity. CRC Press. 2006.
RIAA. “Who We Are.” RIAA website. 2010. Web.
Triplett, William. Reclaim the media. Reclaimthemedia.org. 2007. Web.