The RIAA has been engaging in a systematic and orchestrated campaign of lawsuits against people who, theoretically, have been using peer-to-peer technology in order to download/upload music. RIAA is a useful vehicle to do that without destroying the image of its members, the record companies (as RMS calls them, the music factories). Besides the purely legal problems with this strategy, including unacceptable invasions of privacy, incorrect identification of defendants and the dubious and now discredited making available theory, this conduct is most akin to extortion. Legal fees can be crippling to the average person, whereas for the RIAA they are business as usual. The RIAA’s tactic of intimidation is what leads it to try to settle, in a sort of “if you don’t pay us a lot now you might suffer a legal accident” mode. Many people are justifiably sceptical on the whole notion of bourgeois justice, which is still a form of stylized trial by combat. Like in all trial by combat, the strongest has the advantage, although is not guaranteed a win. Now, someone who had the resources, ability and will to fight the RIAA will get about 100 kilobucks out of it. Hopefully some further reparations will be extracted in the form of punitive damages. While I am opposed to the idea of punitive damages in the abstract, as they represent a sanction without the due guarantees the State’s ius puniendi–right to punish–should be exercised under, I believe in the concrete situation it is probably the only mechanism to curtail this kind of rampaging misuse of the legal procedure as a weapon.
As an aside, the situation in Spain is very different from that in the US. While our own paladins of “rights holders” wage their rhetorical and political campaign and make some gains, like the so-called canon digital–a “private tax” levied on all blank media–their ability to champion their cause in the judicial forum is greatly limited by the Spanish legal system, and in particular by the recognized right to private copying. This is an effective recognition that copyright and economic authors’ rights, insofar as they should exist, should be conceived fundamentally as a form of industrial regulation, and not as a fully erga omnes–with standing against all–property right. Copyright is at best a tool to encourage content creation and distribution, and to protect authors from industrial use of their labour without due compensation. When copyright tries to do more, it becomes an unacceptable restriction on the general liberties of the people.
Tags: copyright, english, intellectual property, IP, judicial extortion, justice, mafiaa, p2p, payback, RIAA, US legal system
