Record Industry Takes the Offensive

To heck with your sympathy. The record industry doesn't want it anymore.

That's an easy conclusion to draw from Monday's announcement that the Recording Industry Association of America has filed 261 separate lawsuits against people it accuses of illegally sharing music online.

The RIAA -- which includes AOL Time Warner's (AOL) Warner Music Group, Vivendi Universal's (V) Universal Music Group, Sony's (SNE) Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Group and Bertelsmann's BMG Entertainment -- has filed civil suits alleging copyright violations in numerous jurisdictions across the country, under a law that provides for damages ranging from $750 to $150,000 for each separate work that's been copied or distributed.

By filing these lawsuits against people who have shared files over peer-to-peer networks such as KaZaA, the record industry promises to generate countless feature stories about music-loving, cheapskate twenty-somethings threatened with judgments of hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to pay for their casual view of copyright law.

The effect of the lawsuits -- in all likelihood, they'll both confirm the mean-spirited image of the music business and scare straight file-sharers not caught up in the current round of litigation -- must also be viewed in light of the sorry state of the music business. In the U.S., the RIAA notes, annual revenue fell 14% from 1999 to 2002. The RIAA blames online piracy, but other factors are at work, including offline piracy, or illegally duplicated discs.

Jersey Barriers

Yet, as much as the record industry didn't want to start suing individual customers -- "Nobody likes playing the heavy and having to resort to litigation," RIAA President Cary Sherman said on a Monday conference call -- the RIAA is now playing the role of the heavy with as much gusto as John Malkovich.

How else to explain Sherman's response to a reporter's question Monday about a hypothetical situation in which a person named in a lawsuit says it wasn't he who was sharing all those songs on his family's hard drive, but, say, his 14-year-old son?