The recording industry of America is doing what it said it would do. Thus far the RIAA has sued just under 300 people. But the number continues to rise, and the purely innocent are sure to get caught in the cross-fire.
To understand how the RIAA is able to issue so many supenas so quickly one has to examine the Digital Millenium Copy Write Act (DMCA for short), this is best summed up by Roy Mark in his story "Senator: Beware RIAA's Amnesty Offer" for Internetnews.com
... [T]he RIAA has issued a blizzard of the DMCA subpoenas. 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."
It's plain to see that we all saw this one comming. Back in July when I wrote about DirectTV and Kevin Poulsen and the 9,000 lawsuits against Hu stream pirates they filed, I mentioned that the RIAA would take a similar stance. The only thing left to see is how the peer to peer network developers respond in how they develop thier software, after all you can't catch what you can't see.
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