James Delahunty
28 Oct 2004 21:23
The Recording Industry Association of America filed another 750 suits against alleged illegal song swappers on Thursday. This brings the total number of suits to 6,191. The suits filed Thursday include students from 13 different universities. This action appears to be a response by the RIAA to the facts disclosed recently that showed overall P2P traffic was not negatively affected by their legal actions. "In order for legitimate services to continue their growth, we cannot ignore those who take and distribute music illegally," RIAA President Cary Sherman said. "There must be consequences to breaking the law, or illegal downloading will cripple the music community's ability to support itself now or invest in the future."
While use of networks such as Fasttrack is dropping, the eDonkey network is increasing in users daily. Also, BitTorrent is being used to swap large files but not small files generally, such as MP3 files. As the RIAA keep victimizing P2P users as opposed to accepting P2P as a new technology and finding out ways to co-exist with it, new ambitious projects are underway. New P2P networks such as ANts P2P and Mute claim they can offer P2P users anonymity, mainly by changing the search results systems to show a HASH code of a user instead of an IP address and routing file transfers so that the real distributor and the real receiver are hiding their identities from each other. Of course, that begs the question; can I be sued for routing a file from the distributor to the receiver?
Source:
News.com