Pirates vs. RIAA: Pirates Win
Stealing, or pirating, music these days is incredibly simple. With an application such as Limewire, anyone is able to find and retrieve any song they want in a matter of minutes, for free. The only thing stopping them is threats by the Record Industry Association of America, or RIAA. However, due to several factors, the risk of receiving a lawsuit for illegally downloading music is miniscule. First, there are too many targets. The RIAA would never be able to sue every individual that pirates music. While they do occasionally choose random filesharers, they generally aim for the people who make money with pirating businesses, such as the ones that sell pirated CDs on the street, and the people who share many files or large amounts of bandwidth. According to EmptyFree.com, the chance of receiving an RIAA lawsuit is approximately 1 in 1282. Unfortunately for the RIAA, they are not able to use a ‘shotgun spray’ technique where they would sue a group of people; instead, they have to file a lawsuit for every individual, one at a time. This greatly limits the efficiency of their lawsuit process. As Mark Milligan of Jupiter Research said in an interview in The Guardian, “If you’re a filesharer, you know that the likelihood of you being caught is very similar to that of being hit by an asteroid.” Out of those people that the RIAA does sue, the majority of them are university students. They are targeting students specifically because they are the worst pirates; they download and share large quantities of music, using the huge bandwidth pipes provided by the school, and they openly trade music with friends all over the campus. Also, they are the least likely to pay for music, without an incentive such as a lawsuit. According to the official RIAA website reporting data from recent surveys, “more than half of the nation’s college students frequently download music and movies illegally from unlicensed P2P [peer-to-peer] networks.” But then, is it any wonder that they don’t want to pay for movies and music when the price of college is rising and the number of students taking out college loans is through the roof? They have enough to pay for without having to spend money on overpriced songs and videos!
Many smarter users can manage to slip through the cracks of the RIAA too, by using less common and harder-to-track methods of file sharing. Limewire is used by millions of people, and the RIAA can obtain peoples’ identification (I.P. address, which can be linked back to name and home address) simply by logging on as a normal user and searching for songs just as any other user would. However, using a method such as open directory downloads, the RIAA is entirely unable to track users and downloads without filing lawsuits against the individual websites for their log files - which may or may not exist - or creating honeypot websites (websites set up to secretly track downloaders) - which would require them to be filesharers themselves, and therefore does not happen. The RIAA is more concerned about the most popular sharing methods - Limewire and inter-campus iTunes shared folders and does not bother trying to track people using sneakier methods. It is also possible to actively try to block the RIAA from retrieving information about you. Software such as ProtoWall and PeerGuardian will block commonly-known government and RIAA IP addresses, in hopes that those addresses would be used to try and track you. Ideally, they would only allow other fellow pirates to retrieve music from you, and shut out the ‘cops’. Unfortunately, it is not always effective, and the RIAA can easily obtain a random anonymous IP address and then use that to contact your computer and gather evidence for a lawsuit, but the software is just one more possible layer of protection, in hopes that they would not bother with anonymous addresses. Yet another simple method of avoiding RIAA lawsuits is simply to avoid the RIAA’s data. There are plenty of music artists out there that are not covered under the RIAA, and if you pirate their songs, the RIAA won’t bother suing you. They are only going after those people who download the big label MP3s. This music, of course, is not as popular, and probably wouldn’t be found on the radio, but has absolutely no risk of lawsuit with it. Finally, if the RIAA were to sue you, you could try to dodge it. One oft-mentioned piece of advice that has not yet been tested (to my knowledge) is to host your Internet connection with an open,
unprotected wireless access point, and then prepare to wipe all shared data from your hard drive when the RIAA notice comes. You could then disprove all RIAA proof simply by claiming that you have no knowledge of the file sharing, and that it must have been a neighbor or other person using your open wi-fi connection. It would be much harder to assert this statement if your access point were protected with a password, but if your computer really had no traces of filesharing data on it, you would probably be let off without fines. The threat of the RIAA is incredibly small. They are fighting a losing battle against the vast amount of pirates across the Internet, and they will never be able to stop people from sharing music for free. Rather than fight it by opening lawsuits, the RIAA should put their efforts towards more incentives for buying music. As it stands now, I see no reason to go and buy a $20 album with 12 songs on it when I could download the whole album, at equal or sometimes greater quality, in a matter of minutes. However, if they were to give me a reason to go spend that money, I would gladly support my favorite artists. Of course, the old folks at RIAA are not familiar with this idea because they are still used to the old days of records, and they think technology can be suppressed. Perhaps sometime in the future, once they’ve beaten their head against the wall enough times, they will finally realize it’s useless and work towards a more productive goal. Until then, I say “happy downloading!”
Bibliography
How to Avoid an RIAA Lawsuit. (2005, July 19). Retrieved January 16, 2008, from EmptyFree: http://www.emptyfree.com/index.php?p=487&c=1 RIAA. (n.d.). For Students Doing Reports. Retrieved January 16, 2008, from RIAA: http://www.riaa.com/faq.php Webb, A. (2007, March 22). Can filesharers be made to pay? Retrieved January 16, 2008, from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/mar/22/musicnews.newmedia