RIAA Subpoenas a Thousand P2P Users

July 20th, The RIAA (The Recording Industry Association of America) has issued close to one thousand subpoenas for those people sharing music files over Peer to Peer services in the last week. As US Copyright law stands, copyright owners can sue for damages of $750 to $150,000 for each song that a person offers over the internet. Initially the RIAA said that they would target those P2P users who were sharing large collections of files, this past week has seen RIAA lawyers going after users with as few as five files.
Latest estimates show that over 60 million Americans use P2P networks such as Kazaa, Kazaa lite, Morpheus and Limewire, which are more people than voted for George Bush in the last Presidential election. To criminalize the everyday actions of 60 million Americans overnight could bring the already over-burdened US criminal system to a deadlock with this insurgance of new "wrong-doers".
These new RIAA subpoenas come in the wake of U.S. District Judge John Bates ruling that the RIAA can issue subpoenas to ISPs demanding the identification of Internet users under the subpoena power of the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) based just on allegations of infringement, without prior notice to the user and without judicial review of the claim.
Verizon claims that the RIAA's action is a violatation of the First Amendment's right to anonymity and privacy rights of Internet users. Furthermore, a Constitutional review of the DMCA is in order since the DMCA subpoena power provision, unlike a usual subpoena, which requires some underlying claim of a crime and must be signed by a judge or magistrate, under the DMCA a subpoena can be issued by a court clerk without presenting evidence of a crime being committed.

For more information please see:
EFF Fair Use Faq http://www.eff.org/IP/eff_fair_use_faq.html
Stanford Fair Use site http://fairuse.stanford.edu/
EFF DMCA Archive http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/
Boycott RIAA http://www.boycott-riaa.com/