The Chronicle’s Wired Campus had a nice wrap-up of the goings on in the supposed post-mass-lawsuit era at the RIAA:
Ray Beckerman, a lawyer in New York who writes the blog Recording Industry vs. the People, went looking for new lawsuits against alleged illegal file-sharers, found three, and called the Recording Industry Association of America’s stated end of its mass-litigation campaign a “total fabrication.”
Ars Technica characterized the RIAA as cagey, for fudging the definition of “new cases,” but the lawyer Ben Sheffner, on his blog Copyrights & Campaigns, said the “new” lawsuits were just “conversions of previous ‘John Doe’ suits against defendants whose names have now been revealed through the subpoena process.” Wired.com headlined its item “Nothing to See Here.”
Indeed, the announcement back in December was that the RIAA would stop suing groups of students — and, in fact, that the trade group had already ceased doing so. That meant an end to more than five years of periodic batch lawsuits against computer users, notoriously college students, who the industry said were illegally sharing copyrighted music files. “Batch” remains an operative word.
For more, Overlawyered points to AmLaw Litigation Daily.