RIAA, Lead Dog for the IP Entertainment Industry

Here's a URL related to the RIAA recent push into ISP-land.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/12/riaa-v-people-turns-lawsuits-3-strikes

Essentially the RIAA wants the ISPs to send an email (presumably) to their customers accusing them of file sharing music files. The French legislature evidently totally caved in to the RIAA. User blacklisting is possible there.

First off how do they identify the user or his ISP? The presumption has to be that the RIAA is spending a lot of time downloading music files from P2P systems and doing reverse DNS lookups. Doesn't that sound exactly like the very thing they are trying to stop? Does the musician get a payment each time the RIAA downloads a music file? Of course not.

I would hope that the RIAA is keeping VERY accurate time and date stamps on the downloads because nobody is going to know if Suzy is doing the music serving or her daddy is, since they are both on the same DSL connection.

On the other side of the connection the "downloader" gets away free unless the RIAA is actually breaking the law and serving real music files up to downloaders. That's illegal entrapment if the files are real music files. Its not a crime if the files are NOT real music files.

Using TOR or some other anonymous masking technology would make this RIAA technique of harassment impossible. When this doesn't work the RIAA will start paying ISP's to spy on its customers. Get ready to be aggravated yet again.

The MPAA (movie industry) is looking at the RIAA efforts with interest for sure. They have much deeper pockets and are losing more than the music industry.

Users running home servers need to think long and hard about what sorts of entertainment program material to allow to be downloaded even by family members through Internet connections.