It's all over the news that a woman was fined $1.9 million for illegally downloading 24 songs. Which is of course a miscarriage of justice, an outrage, crazy, appalling, whatever you want to call it.
In reality, the RIAA and related groups have mostly stopped suing
people ... part of my job is processing the big scary cease-and-desist
emails they send to
the university I work for. The emails include dates, times, IP
addresses, files shared, etc. My job is to identify which sysadmin is
responsible for the
network the illegal filesharing incident occurred on, and to send the
notes along to him or her. If the infraction involved our wireless network, I figure out who the
student was and
forward the messages along directly (and then deal with the
panicky/angry emails the student sends back).
We get dozens of RIAA/movie studio notices each day, and have been
for over a year ... I'm not aware of a lawsuit having emerged from any
of them.
Mostly, the companies want to scare people into not illegally
sharing/downloading movies and songs etc. -- so the occasional
highly-publicized, wildly-expensive
lawsuit fits into that scheme -- but in general they're not going after
little fish other than to send warnings.
Occasionally, of course, a filesharer gets unlucky ... I don't
file share myself for a variety of reasons, and one of them is certainly
because I don't
want to "win" the lawsuit lottery when it's easy enough to get music and movies legitimately.
The need for tort reform and the need to disengage our legal system from corporate influences aside, here's my public service announcement:
If you're going to share files on a traceable server, share the good stuff. Don't be like all these students I've seen who got dinged over filesharing "My Humps". There's just no dignity in that.