PhotoDude.com

Tue. Jan 28, 2003

The New Jailbird Jingle

The New Jailbird Jingle – “If you’ve ever used a peer-to-peer network and swapped copyrighted files, chances are pretty good you’re guilty of a federal felony. It doesn’t matter if you’ve forsworn Napster, uninstalled Kazaa and now are eagerly padding the record industry’s bottom line by snapping up $15.99 CDs by the cartload. Be warned—you’re what prosecutors like to think of as an unindicted federal felon.”

“I’m not joking. A obscure law called the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act that former U.S. President Bill Clinton signed in 1997 makes peer-to-peer (P2P) pirates liable for $250,000 in fines and subject to prison terms of up to three years.”

Now, no one has yet been prosectuted under this law, but this article makes it clear the RIAA isn’t too happy about that, have sent their Congresscritters to the Justice Department seeking prosecutions, and are making other noises: “Yet there are signs that prosecutions are coming soon. A person close to the RIAA told me that it has had recent meetings with the Justice Department.”

“A second hint that pressure on the Justice Department is increasing lies in a statement of principles that the RIAA signed this month with the Computer Systems Policy Project and the BSA. The trio of groups say they want more ’governmental enforcement actions against infringers.’”

The record companies have been crying for months about how sales have dropped up to 10% over the past year or two. Guess what? So have mine. It’s called a recession. Sales of items that qualify as “disposable income,” like music CD’s, are often depressed during tight times. But this effort to force felony prosecution makes it appear that the recording industry is trying to staunch this flow of 10% of their blood by sticking the knife in their customer base.

The first person who gets charged under this law for simple file trading, not big time sales of pirated CD’s, will become a better known household name than 98% of the artists on record company rosters. It will touch off a firestorm in their own marketplace that will make them long for the days of 10% decrease in sales. It’s like watching an industry hold a gun to its own head.

“A quick check of Kazaa on Friday afternoon showed that there were 4.1 million users online, sharing some 800 million files. The odds of any specific person getting busted are pretty low, but someone’s going to be a test case. Got your lawyer ready?”