RIAA Launches P2PLawsuits.com

Found on Wired on Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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As part of its new initiative to convince universities to turn over the names of students suspected of copyright infringement (more on that soon), the RIAA has launched its P2Plawsuits.com website, which, in a deliciously ironic twist, had previously hosted all sorts of ads for dodgy P2P clients.

On the site, students whose universities have agreed to turn over student names to the RIAA and users whose ISPs have agreed to turn over subscriber names to the RIAA can apply for a settlement by entering their case number, and even pay their settlement online, which the RIAA promises will be represent "a substantial discount" from what they would have had to settle for before this campaign launched.

The new process is a response to the RIAA's frustration with our legal system, which requires the organization to use the IP address of a suspected infringer to subpoena ISPs or universities for the name of the suspected infringer, after which settlement talks usually begin.

Now that may sound user-friendly (in their terms), but everybody who hasn't spent the past few years under a rock will know that the industry doesn't give away discounts for nothing; especially not if you violated their copyrights. One of the major reasons behind this project might be the fact that they run into more and more problems with their lawsuit strategy. Thanks to missing evidence, they have to settle lawsuits without getting anything. Confronted with the fact that a lawsuit has a high chance of failing, it might be a good idea to try and extort money from people without meeting in front of a court.