RIAA says it will continue fight, despite subpoena ruling

IDG News Service - The Recording Industry Association of America Inc. (RIAA), which has requested hundreds of subpoenas this year and filed 382 civil lawsuits against people who allegedly shared music files illegally, will continue its legal fight -- even without the benefit of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) subpoenas, the association said in a statement.
"This decision is inconsistent with both the views of Congress and the findings of the district court," Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, said in a statement. "It unfortunately means we can no longer notify illegal file sharers before we file lawsuits against them to offer the opportunity to settle outside of litigation. Verizon is solely responsible for a legal process that will now be less sensitive to the interests of its subscribers who engage in illegal activity."
His comments came after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the industry group doesn't have the authority under U.S. law to subpoena the names of alleged peer-to-peer file traders from Internet service providers (see story). The appellate court overturned a lower-court decision that allowed the RIAA to subpoena Verizon Internet Services Inc. for the names of suspected copyright infringers without having to file lawsuits against the alleged file traders.
The RIAA's argument that subpoenas allowed in the 1998 DMCA apply to material transmitted through an ISP as well as to content stored by an ISP "borders upon the silly," the court wrote.
Verizon officials weren't immediately available for comment, but a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the ruling a victory for Internet users.
"Internet users are the winners in the Verizon case," EFF staff attorney Wendy Seltzer said in an e-mail. "The effect of the appeals court decision is that we do not lose our privacy simply by connecting to the Internet. The ruling stops the record labels from taking our free speech rights as collateral damage in the campaign against the American music fan."

The DMCA doesn't allow for copyright holders to subpoena the names of ISP subscribers who simply use the ISP to access the Internet, wrote Chief Judge Douglas Ginsburg. "We are not unsympathetic either to the RIAA's concern regarding the widespread infringement of its members' copyrights, or to the need for legal tools to protect those rights," Ginsburg wrote in his opinion. "It is not the province of the courts, however, to rewrite the DMCA in order to make it fit a new and unforeseen Internet architecture, no matter how damaging that development has been to