02/17/2005: 
Criminally Absurd
The Economics of RIAA Lawsuits
from P2P.net
"None of the almost 8,500 cases lodged by the RIAA against people who share music with each other has reached a court."
It was an ingenious plan: Lawyers would pay around $200 in court fees to subpoena an ISP into revealing the owners of a list of IP addresses the RIAA had accumulated. Before November, the RIAA was able to gather around 50 identities per subpoena. Assuming each person received a letter with a phone number to a similar settlement center, and each person decided to pay a little now instead of a lot later by settling, and each person settled for the then-average $3,000, then for $200 the RIAA could make an easy $150,000.
In some federal courts, that is still the case. However, the federal courts in Austin decided that the RIAA may no longer file blanket-style subpoenas and must file separate paperwork for each IP address. This changed little except the RIAA's strategy and jacked up the average price of settlements from $3,000 to $4,000. After all, the RIAA had to now invest $10,000 instead of $200 to get their $150,000.
In January, the Big Music Mafia boasted it had launched another 717 lawsuits against people who share music online, bringing the total number of those victimized to a shocking 8,423. If each one of these victims settled at the pre-inflated average of $3,000, then the RIAA is set to make an easy $25,269,000.
A very interesting article indeed.
