The debate between those who pirate and those in the entertainment industry has been a heated one. The RIAA, movie and music industry have all tried for many years now to put to a stop or at least to take a blow against people downloading movies, music or even video games without hardly any real sustainable success. One of the few succesfull events was the shocking lawsuit against Jammie Thomas-Rasset of $1.5 million. The original decision was slapped down being a mastermind of a piracy organazation or what? Nope, she downloaded 24 songs on Kazaa.
The decision was appealed and fast forward to July and that 1.5 million was deemed "appalling" by a judge and reduced to $54,000, amounting to $2,250 per song. (each song normall costs around $.99) This wasn't the first re-trial, going up and down from 222k all the way up to a shocking 1.92 million but before this case was at 1.5 million. Many would say that $54k still seems like a high amount, a normal $.99 song becoming an over $2000 song and if you count for $23.76 for the real cost of those songs and even add in legal fees and such, it doesn't seem sensible for a person to be paying over fifty thousand dollars for such a small crime.
Another case recently was the Expandables movie having the biggest file-sharing lawsuit in history, a massive 23,322 users were sued being suspected of downloading/sharing through torrent. However it was deemed that only those "reasonably likely to be living in the District of Columbia" can be involved in the lawsuit, not even being able to subpoena other ISP's in other areas, Torrentfreak put the number at 84 out of those 23,322 that could only be sued.
It's not to say that the industry is totally failing, but for sometime now they've been in a bad spot and instead of acting rationally they act like they've been horribly wronged and have had the attack dogs out. The problem is those dogs are blind and while tough and bite some of there enemies, ultimately they're not going to win.
I could pretend to be in the middle of this, but I'm not. Not to say that the pirate side of things is totally in the right, but I'd say that between right and wrong it doesn't even compare. The RIAA doesn't look either going after house moms or middle aged blue collar workers, instead it looks like the big corporate guy going after the little guys.
Some of the more recent developments include a "six strike rule" with the biggest ISP's which really end up being not much more than a whole lot of finger shaking, the end result being some minor annoyances. The much more worrysome is just two days ago Domain Seizures although previously ruled unconstitutional, now ruled as NOT violating free speech. This is much worse and bigger impact than any of the packet sniffing and lawsuits the RIAA has done. Ultimately though while it is a decently effective method, the problem for the government is the group this is intended at, happens to be the group that is the most savy computer wise and it is very easy to make your away around it.
Ultimately though while it is a decently effective method, the problem for the government is the group this is intended at, happens to be the group that is the most savy computer wise and it is very easy to make your away around it. The Protect IP Act is worrying in the vagueness and the depth. If the RIAA wants a site gone it's gone, but then search engines have to remove any links to that and any other sites linking to that site have to remove them. So it's not just deleting a website, it's erasing it and forgetting it ever existed and ignoring any consequences innocent persons that may be tangled in this giant web.
I found a great article on Zeropaid which shows 8 methods around this - 8 Technical Methods That Make the PROTECT IP Act Useless. From VPN to a simple plugin to your broswer, all the options have upsides and downs but a few in particular (such as TOR and MAFIAAFire) are quite easy and painless to use. It will be interesting to see how this develops, the RIAA has been quite slow to adapt and while this is a significant development considering they're goal, this falls quite short in a "not enough" kind of way.