The letter is a real hoot – if I settle before Oct 6, it’ll only cost me $2,900, but if I miss that deadline, I can still avoid being named as a defendant if I pay $3,900 by Oct 20th. Yeah right, let me get my checkbook…

My questions:

I have not seen very much discussion regarding the future of businesses/institutions offering free wifi, if they are to be held accountable for what their customers download. If this was being taken seriously, why aren’t we hearing about Starbucks and Libraries all over the country shutting down their wifi? Or having to look over the shoulders of their customers to make sure they are behaving (as if that would even be feasible)?

All the cases I’ve seen involve a particular incident, with a particular movie. Well, regardless of whether it was someone mooching of a neighbors wifi, a relative/guest taking advantage of their host, someone sitting in a parking lot at 3 am using a businesses free wifi, or someone actually using their own secure connection to knowingly pirate a movie (probably the least prevalent), if it happened once, you can bet it could have happened once a day for the past how many years? If they are successful at prosecuting some poor unsuspecting person once, what’s to stop the floodgates from opening up and these people from getting slammed over and over again?

The letter I received was just first class mail, I did not have to sign for it – how do they know I actually received it? It seems to me that if you are being (or could be) sued, and are being offered a settlement to avoid being prosecuted, there would have to be some kind of proof that you recieved the offer of settlement and ignored it? Honestly, I almost threw it away as junk mail (which I get a ton of) before I even opened it.

Does anybody know what happens to the other “two thirds” that do not fall for the threats and do not pay? Has there been a case yet where someone has actually been brought to trial after not paying the “settlement” fee? Does it matter whether anyone who does not settle is actually prosecuted (i.e. that they followed thorugh on the threat of prosecution, rather than just being happy with the fish they caught in the net)? If this all turns out to be illegal, should any of the people who felt they were coerced into paying be entitled to reimbursement?

It’s a non-issue though. Dinosaurs don’t just die out. In the future my guess is that MPAA and RIAA will still be around – as fuzzy squeaky little rodents scurrying through high grass.

Which would mean massive numbers of settlement cases on behalf of irate artists, among others.

The members of these organizations do tend to be the largest commercial purveyors of pirated goods around – see the lawsuit against CRIA, for example.

This very basic criteria fails in all respects when you try to lump massive numbers of people together in a single court case – especially since you can come up with nothing more than an indicator that persons A, B or C have committed an infringement or to what extent in the first place. In short, you cannot often in practice reverse a class-action suit and have a single entity sue thousands of defendants all in one go without breaking the entire legal system.

Something to which judges have wised up and which should by rights have had a number of lawyers driving these suits disbarred for fraud impeding administration of justice. The rankest paralegal should be fully aware that many of the suits brought forward by the RIAA seem to be founded on nothing more than legal fast-talk – or outright fraud.

If one legal entity has a grievance against another entity then that can only be settled in a way where culpability can be reasonably apportioned. I.e. many people can sue one other in a majority of cases but the reverse is rarely possible.

This very basic criteria fails in all respects when you try to lump massive numbers of people together in a single court case – especially since you can come up with nothing more than an indicator that persons A, B or C have committed an infringement or to what extent in the first place. In short, you cannot often in practice reverse a class-action suit and have a single entity sue thousands of defendants all in one go without breaking the entire legal system.

Something to which judges have wised up and which should by rights have had a number of lawyers driving these suits disbarred for fraud impeding administration of justice. The rankest paralegal should be fully aware that many of the suits brought forward by the RIAA seem to be founded on nothing more than legal fast-talk – or outright fraud.

If one legal entity has a grievance against another entity then that can only be settled in a way where culpability can be reasonably apportioned. I.e. many people can sue one other in a majority of cases but the reverse is rarely possible.