Intellectual Property Law

Norm-Shifting Litigation

By Tim Armstrong, Derek Bambauer, and William McGeveran.

It was the end of an era when the music industry announced late last year that it would end its five-year campaign of filing tens of thousands of copyright infringement lawsuits against end-users of peer-to-peer file-sharing software in favor of a new plan that relied more heavily on intermediaries, such as internet service providers, to police infringement on their systems (a plan that seems to have met with, at best, lukewarm support from U.S. ISPs and outright hostility abroad).  Lawsuits that were still pending as of the date of the industry’s announcement, however, continued chugging along; the announcement was only about the RIAA’s plan to make no new filings.

One of those still-pending cases settled today for $7,000 (which seems generally in line with prior settlements, in view of the fact that there were two accused downloaders).  I found this comment from the story particularly striking (emphasis mine):

?We are pleased to have reached an agreement with the Santangelos,? Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the R.I.A.A., said in an e-mailed statement. ?

She said the lawsuit had succeeded in showing that breaking the law has consequences and in steering music fans toward legal online services ?that fairly compensate musicians and labels.?

The really interesting phenomenon, however, is just how resistant P2P users’ norms proved to be to the RIAA’s litigation campaign. Indeed, if the campaign was actually “steering fans toward legal online services,” it would doubtless still be underway.  If P2P users now understood “that breaking the law has consequences,” the entertainment industry would not be complaining so loudly about piracy.  What actually happened was, the RIAA sued a bunch of people, and users apparently reacted with a shrug, so they stopped suing.  Why did the RIAA’s years-long (and expensive) litigation campaign fail to sway hearts and minds?  More generally, has suing people ever been an effective way to alter their opinions?  Those are the questions that the content industries ought to be trying to answer.

Full post as published by Info/Law on April 28, 2009 (boomark / email).