p2pnet.net News:- The RIAA and its “member companies” stand “eager and willing” to settle the lawsuits launched against file sharers “expeditiously,” it says in a statement.

The member companies the RIAA refers to are the Big Five record labels which in fact own it and translated, “expeditiously” means the Organized Music enforcement unit wants to panic people into settling out of court as quickly as possible.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is suing another 493 innocent people for sharing music online and RIAA president Cary Sherman says, “We will continue to go the extra mile and seek to resolve these cases in a fair and reasonable manner. That’s in the best interests of everyone involved.”

‘Fair and reasonable is’, of course, a concept the labels are aware of in a theoretical rather than practical sense, but it reads well.

In the meanwhile, the last ‘A’ in RIAA stands for America, but of the enforement unit’s five principal owners, only Warner Music is actually American.

The others are: Vivendi Universal’s Universal Music Group (France), Bertelsmann AG’s BMG (Germany), EMI Group Plc’s EMI (UK) and Sony Corps’ Sony Music (Japan).

In addition to 493 lawsuits, 24 named defendants - “individuals who were identified through ‘John Doe’ litigations and then declined or ignored a RIAA overture to settle the case before it proceed [sic] any further” - are also lined up for a hammering.

Lawsuits were filed in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, Minnesota, Missouri, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Texas.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2004 at 12:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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